We went in off Green Street into Blue Boar, the satellite colony where Tudor stashed its second years, and from there along a series of heavily salted walkways to the door of the main lobby. We took the lift up to the fourth floor. Francis had a view out over the walls and towers of Tudor Great Court, and beyond them to the dome of St John’s. He was engaged, as he explained to me, in a long-running battle with the Sunday bells from Tudor College Chapel, which called the faithful to morning mass at eight-thirty. He was experimenting with rolls of sound-deadening cloth, and one was pinned to the roof above the window, which ran from floor to ceiling all the way through the building. His room was chaotic, a testament to his tendency to develop sudden and explosive passions, to become quickly proficient in random disciplines and then instantly abandon them. The bed was unmade. Around the frame of the door there hung part of a butterfly collection in glass boxes, the wings pinned back, meticulously labelled in his loopy handwriting. There was a photograph of the Hon. Jeremy Manley, his younger brother and heir to the family throne, standing against a vine-covered stone wall, looking at the camera with an uncertain smile, squinting against the light. There was a trumpet. There were books on diverse subjects, first editions and flimsy paperbacks, hanging like circumflexes over the arms of chairs, or closed and discarded with fragments of paper poking out of the middle to indicate a place. Everywhere I looked there were empty bottles and cans, some of them with dirty, auspicious labels dating back to the seventies, some of them crumpled old tins of Budweiser. He had a penchant for buying expensive things and treating them badly, and there were Versace jackets, Favorbrook waistcoats and D & G T-shirts in piles on the floor. Amongst the general debris only one series of items was properly cared for: he had a large collection of records, bought and traded since he was sixteen, and a set of decks. Francis liked to DJ, the only thing he did with a total lack of skill, a deficiency which was made charming by the contrast with his usual effortlessness. It was perhaps his lack of ability that had sustained his interest so far beyond the usual period of infatuation. As if in acknowledgement of this one shortcoming, the records he used to mix were always wiped clean, carefully boxed and filed away at the end of a session. They lay in ranks against one wall in the belly of an open trunk, lined with professional-looking grey foam. But the most extraordinary object of all hung above Francis’s bed. When I saw it I felt a thrill run through my body and pins and needles in my hands that seemed at the time only proof of its genius, but which I have since been tempted to diagnose as the tingle of destiny.

Francis gestured to it without looking whilst he hunted around on the floor for new shoes, and said, ‘Do you like my Picasso?’