With money and work taken care of, we were left with the problem of how to spend our time. When I was alone I painted and sketched, but for the most part we were together. We attended lectures, but seldom on our own subjects. We saw plants, sculptures and plays expertly dissected. I learnt a few words of Japanese. We tended to go to these lectures together so we could discuss them afterwards, and only in the afternoons. We would meet before midday in the Copper Kettle on King’s Parade, each of us brandishing a printout of the day’s programme, and make a case for our favourite lecture. The five of us, sometimes four if Francis was badly hung-over, would sit down at the table by the window with a stainless-steel teapot on a plastic tray and argue for half an hour. Then the winner would lead the party, all wrapped in thick overcoats and woollen scarves, off towards whichever lecture halls housed their faculty, heading across the icy pavements to take a short cut through King’s College, the red rock salt crunching under our feet, or back towards Old School Lane. Lisa’s preferences were generally scientific, for Medicine, Chemistry and Law. Francis and Jessica preferred Humanities and Languages, and Michael could be relied upon to launch into a robust defence of whatever was playing in Politics or Classics, which was his own discipline. I liked Art History, and took the derision which usually met my suggestions in good humour. Francis explained to me that the key was to divorce study from its associations with labour, to treat it as a pure pleasure, with no pressure to remember or even to understand what we heard. When I asked him what we would do about exams he laughed, and told me that, so long as I was not set on a starred first, Lisa would sort it out. She had left school at sixteen, had never taken A levels herself (a fact known only to her immediate friends), and the means by which she had secured her place at Christ’s was a mystery she refused to elucidate.

There was one occasion which stands out in my memory as one of those experiences that can never be unlearned. It had snowed the night before. The sloping roofs of the windows were thatched with snow, sitting above warm yellow squares of light where the students were awake. When I came to the Copper Kettle at eight-thirty my footprints were among the first in the thick white crystals, scoring the surface like musical notes in an exercise book. I opened the door, and saw Francis sitting alone in a fug of teapot steam at one of the tables opposite the windows. This in itself was a strange beginning to the day – he almost always arrived last, just when the rest of us had given up waiting, and were sorting our scarves and coats from the pile on the bench. When he heard the door open he looked up expectantly, and when he identified me a great smile spread the width of his jaw, and I knew I was just the person he had wanted to see first. I smiled back at him and went to take off my coat.