This is really a PS to today's entry, because I cannot forbear from keeping an episode from tonight to myself. It's pure vanity really, so forgive me.

I always dim the lights at 8.30pm, for silent reading. The corridor lights are on dimmer switches, and so they go down, and the main lights in the dorm are switched off. Something I learnt from my many hours in the Radcliffe Infirmary when I had all my ophthalmological problems in the mid-nineties.

A Newtonian walked past me, on his way back from the vins. He stopped and looked up.

"You're not really like a lodge parent, are you, sir.'

"Am I not?" I enquired, mystified.

"No, you're like a real parent."

Lodgemastering doesn't get much better than that.