I had a letter from my friend Leo the other day, one of the most interesting men I have ever met. The son of a navvy and a cleaner, he won an exhibition to Balliol to read English and when he arrived in Oxford his Geordie accent was so strong that he was often incomprehensible to mollycoddled posh kids from the south like me.
At that stage, Leo was determined to become a bullfighter, and I will never forget the astonished horror on my Anglo-Saxon tutor’s face when Leo announced that he had been unable to write an essay on ‘The Seafarer’ that week because he had been talking on the local radio station about his ambition. Sadly he never became a matador, and after graduating he bummed happily around for many years, earning a crust as a life-class model.
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