An undergraduate anorak at 32

When I was 32, tired at last, for the moment anyway, of seizing the day, I stopped drinking and gave up smoking and enrolled for two A-levels in one year at the local technical college. My decision coincided with a state decision to expand the middle class and I was awarded a small government grant. I found I was ripe for study, passed both exams with good grades and applied to Hertford College, Oxford, to read English. The choice of college was specifically and perhaps idiotically based on a romantic obsession with Evelyn Waugh’s life and work. By a startling coincidence, I was interviewed in Waugh’s old ground-floor rooms next to the quad, and I noted that the window, if left open, was at exactly the right height for someone with ‘a kind of insane and endearing orderliness, in his extremity’ to lean in from outside and be sick into the room.

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