A university is, or ought to be, a world of extraordinary new possibilities for the student who first arrives there. I was one of the gullible horde who signed up for the freshmen's tour of the Cambridge Union, forked out the rather large joining fee, and never set foot in the building again. But for those not interested in trying to make their way into politics, there were plenty of other ways of spending their spare time: societies of all sorts that catered for a myriad of interests. A fair number of students always regarded this extra-curricular life as the one for which they had come to university in the first place, treating their academic work as a necessary excuse for pursuing what really mattered to them. Stephen Fry describes himself as one of these but for me a more relevant, if much earlier example here would be T. C. Worsley, the author of that splendid memoir which takes its title from a reference to ‘flannelled fools at the wicket’ in a Kipling poem. After having been a public school teacher for a while, Worsley spent most of his life writing drama criticism for the New Statesmen and the Financial Times. In his last year at Cambridge, which must still have been in the 1920s, he was taught by Leavis whom he describes as arriving at the supervision ‘dressed in an open shirt which shocked us to the depth of our conventional souls, his bald head brown with nature culture’. That he found Leavis stimulating and remained an admirer long after he had left university did not mean that he did much work there, and he confesses to having spent most of his time either on the playing field or in ‘The Hawks Club smoking room’, where all the serious Cambridge sportsmen congregated.

As a schoolboy, a lot of my time was spent in sporting activities. I liked soccer without being much good at it. After I had left school and was waiting to go to university, I went to the trouble of joining Sale rugby club and played a few games at scrum half for the most minor of their teams.