Chapter 1

In which I arrive in Cambridge and renew various old acquaintances including a criminologist, a scruffy ex-war criminal, a Baron, a couple of Porters and a politician.

Having lost my balance on making contact with the aforementioned instrument and collapsed in an ungainly heap (has anyone ever collapsed in any other kind of heap?), before I had even had a chance to rise to my feet and salvage whatever remnants of my dignity remained, I found myself on the receiving end of an aggressively pointy finger, accompanied by an extremely posh and plummy Scottish accent which seemed vaguely familiar.

            “You, sir! If you have damaged my tuba I warn you I shall have no choice but to litigate!” said the little balding fellow who seemed to be attached to the finger. 

            This was a bit much, I felt. After all, the tuba, unlike its unwitting and bruised assailant, was pretty thoroughly protected by its very sturdy case, and the case did not appear to even have had the decency to make it look like it had been a fair fight by falling over onto its side! No, the oblong b*****d just sat there and wobbled gently at me, in what can only be described as an unnecessarily smug manner.

            “Oh for heaven’s sake do your worst - I happen to be a lawyer!” I snapped back peevishly. One benefit of my profession is that those who are not in our world labour under the misapprehension that not only do we know what we’re talking about most of the time, but that we also have this magical ability to mould the letter of the law to our advantage (and the disadvantage of those who dare to cross us) in any given situation. Wordy wizards, if you will. As such I was expecting a hasty retreat from my adversary in response to my ominous declaration. What I was not expecting was a jovial chuckle.

            “A bold assertion, young Roger Whiteley, to make to a man who once had the dubious pleasure of marking three of your essays!  I believe, incidentally, that I am still owed a fourth, and after fifteen years I am expecting a veritable humdinger, my boy!”

            The penny dropped.

            “Mr Sinclair?” I stammered. My tremulous words had barely had the opportunity to escape from the relative security of my lips before they were aggressively seized upon.

            “Mr Sinclair, is it now? Not content with subjecting my tuba to unspeakable acts of violence, you now see fit to strip me of my professorship! Are there any further insults you would care to add to these injuries? Perhaps you would like to take the opportunity to cast aspersions on the attractiveness of my wife while you’re at it?” My mouth opened and shut like a blowfish, but no sound emerged. It was only then that I clocked the twinkle in the old fellow’s eye, and dared to venture a grin.

            I call him an “old fellow” but in fact that’s only half right. Gerald Sinclair is indeed a Fellow at my old college, St Crispian’s, where he has taught Criminology and Criminal Justice and various courses involving variants of these fascinating topics for a couple of decades now. “St Crisps”, as those of us in the know colloquially refer to it, is one of the smaller and lesser known colleges sandwiched tightly between Kings and Trinity. I won’t regale you with a list of our alumni as it is not a particularly impressive list; the rumour going round college when I was an undergraduate that Timmy Mallett had once graced our hallowed halls with his illustrious presence (studying Classics, naturally) had sadly proven to be a hoax. 

            As to the “old” part, however, it struck me as I looked at him again now that I must now be older than he had been when he had taught me more or less everything I had since forgotten about “Sentencing and the Penal System” back in dim and distant 2004. Already balding at that point, we youngsters had assumed that he was already about fifty. Then, however, we had stumbled upon his wikipedia entry, which I am told has since disappeared and reappeared several times on the grounds that the powers that be at wikipedia can’t quite make up their minds as to whether he is important enough to justify an entry. At the point we had discovered it, the entry had run to a pithy three lines, but had, crucially, revealed that our scholarly, myopic, almost aggressively middle aged supervisor was in fact a week younger than the actor Matt Damon. 

            All I can say is that twenty years of having to mark half arsed undergraduate essays and supping second rate port at formal halls, whilst making tedious chit chat with wealthy donors, clearly ages a person a great deal more than getting oneself stranded on various outlandish planets, as Mr Damon now seems to do in all his films. The man now standing before me was clearly wearing every one of his fifty and a bit years, and looked as though he had borrowed a few from someone else while he was at it. 

            What was left of his hair, which had once been black, was greying. His round glasses were noticeably thicker than the ones he had worn in his thirties. And poor posture, or perhaps my faulty memory, seemed to have caused the professor to shrink slightly over the intervening decade and a half. I vaguely recollected that Sinclair had been an enthusiastic dabbler in the dark art of amateur dramatics - a passion he shares with my father, a long standing member of the Tunbridge Wells Amateur Theatrical Society. Looking at him now, it struck me that if he had not yet bagged the role of Moley in a production of Wind in the Willows, it was surely only a matter of time.

            “Where are you headed?” Sinclair asked. 

            “As it happens, I’m off to Cambridge!” I declared breezily, before realising that in doing so I was almost certainly condemning myself to a further hour or so of awkward chit chat, given that Sinclair, as a Cambridge resident, would inevitably be heading in the same direction. Whilst I had always enjoyed the professor’s supervisions and found him a stimulating teacher back in the day, I was not sure I had an hour of mind numbing small talk in me. Sure enough, he was beaming with delight.

            “Excellent, so am I! Platform 9 I believe,” he announced, scuttling off briskly in that direction without so much as pausing the conversation, wielding his tuba before him in a show of strength which belied his frail appearance. “What brings you back to your old haunts then?”

            “A bit of a reunion,” I replied. Sinclair grimaced.

            “You’d better let me know which pubs to avoid then, my boy!” I smiled. Once a student, always a student, at least in Sinclair’s mind. 

            Truth be told though, I suspected that he was not far wrong and that the old gang, myself included, would find ourselves regressing back to our youthful ways pretty quickly once we were back in our old surroundings. At least I hoped so - I needed a break from feeling middle aged. I had even had a crack at Dry January earlier in the year, may God have mercy on my soul, albeit it had been a somewhat half-hearted attempt, with the first signs of moisture being detected on the 3rd of the month.

            We boarded the train. It was mid-afternoon, so well before rush hour. It’s funny to think of Cambridge as a commuter town, but a chap I know (mad bugger) does the Cambridge to London run every day. We had the pick of the seats so Professor Sinclair treated his tuba to the window seat and plopped himself next to it, clearly expecting me to take the spot across the aisle and leaving me with no socially acceptable choice but to do so. I found myself fervently hoping that the professor had brought a book to read, as he had never struck me as a particularly sociable chap back in the day. 

            Clearly, however, he had grown more gregarious with age. He did have a book with him; his sort always does. In this case it was a rather large and grisly looking volume entitled “Sausages, Sex and Shootings: The True Story of the Butcher of Babraham”, which he perched on the little table in front of his seat. However, it quickly became clear that he had absolutely no intention of reading it and that he was just leaving it there as an insurance policy in case it transpired that I had turned into a complete weirdo.

            “So, Young Master Whiteley, what’s the news with you? Married yet?”

            “No,” I admitted, reflecting glumly that this was unlikely to be the last time this topic arose over the course of the weekend. The  vast majority of my old friends who were attending were now married with kids, and at thirty seven, more than half way through my allotted three score years and ten, I was starting to feel as though that particular boat, although not yet missed, was already thinking about weighing anchor. 

            Probably the greatest Whiteley of all time, the former Countdown presenter Richard Whiteley (sadly no relation) had been known during his own time at Cambridge as “Twice Nightly Whiteley”. In his later years he claimed that “Once Yearly, Nearly” was actually closer to the truth. But unfortunately I lack my illustrious namesake’s rugged charisma and raw sexual magnetism, and truth be told, my love life at Cambridge had been a very short catalogue of disasters. Things had not markedly improved since.

            “Ah, well, you’re still a boy!” Sinclair beamed at me reassuringly. “I was past forty when I tied the knot and now I’ve got a seven year old son running me ragged!” His rolling of his “r”s was extremely, and I thought probably deliberately, Gandalfesque.

            “And what does your wife do?” I asked, happy to move the conversation on to focus on his domestic bliss rather than my marked lack of it. The professor laughed.

            “My dear Whiteley, you HAVE done a good job of dodging the grasping talons of our alumni relations department! My wife is in fact someone who you are already acquainted with and who has in fact mentioned your name in glowing terms on no less than three occasions during our decade of marital bliss!” 

            “Oh really?” I asked dutifully, although in fact my curiosity was now genuinely aroused. “Who is she?” 

            “None other than Emily Morwyn, the Master of your old college! Which, I suppose, makes me a mistress!” he added dryly. 

            Well, talking of aroused...

            I had been aware that The Reverend Dr Morwyn had recently assumed the mantle of Master of St Crispian’s College, but back in my day she had just been the Dean. And we had all fancied the pants off her. Fancying one’s College Dean is not something most university students are prepared to admit to, but then Emily Morwyn had been no ordinary Dean. A few years younger, and a good couple of inches taller, than the man who I was still struggling to believe was her husband, I remembered her as a dynamic, stimulating and witty woman with a shock of lustrous but unruly black hair. Even thinking about her again was cheering me up. In choosing her, St Crispian’s College had done well. Gerald Sinclair, even more so.

            As the train moved off, Mr Sinclair asked me how my work was going. I found that I had just enough to say about that rather turgid aspect of my existence to keep us going until Finsbury Park. Sinclair’s efforts to seem interested were admirable; whether that was his wife’s influence or his well-honed amateur acting skills coming into play I was not quite sure. 

            I think it was a relief to both of us when we moved on to discussing his life’s work and what was new in the world of criminology. I had forgotten how scintillating a speaker Sinclair could be when he got going, and the journey ended up flying by with a bare minimum of awkward British pauses. Our discussion was peppered with anecdotes about the various criminals Sinclair had encountered in his time along our route, from the Stevenage strangler to the Letchworth lecher and the Royston arsonist (he seemed to have a particular penchant for alliterative criminals, albeit that last one was a bit of a stretch - there’s never a good honest robber around when you need one!)       

     

As such I was almost regretful when we pulled up at Cambridge station fifty odd minutes later. It had taken me a couple of years after leaving university to fully grasp the fact that the world really is a lot larger than one thinks of it being when one is an undergraduate, and that random encounters with old acquaintances are much rarer than one might imagine (except, inevitably, with those one is most eager to avoid!)

            “How are you getting into town?” Sinclair asked as we strolled along the platform. “There’ll be more Panther taxis than you can shake a stick at when we get to the exit, even at this time of day.”

            “Those guys were already operating in my time,” I declared, sounding more like Rod Taylor in The Time Machine than I had intended to.

            “Oh yes, but they’ve grown hugely since then - they’ve got a small army of cabbies now. The Panther Brothers must be two of the most powerful businessmen in the whole of South Cambridgeshire now! I know them slightly. I have a rather tense relationship with the younger one, but the older boy, Rajesh, is a likeable enough cove, so if he is as intent on world domination as the growth rate of his business suggests, we could do a whole lot worse, I’d say!”

            As it happened, however, my old chum Britta had agreed to meet me at the station, and as Sinclair and I turned the corner into the main station concourse I could see her waving vigorously at me. 

            Britta was one of the few members of our crowd who had eventually settled locally, or at least partially. Her husband, Neil Norman, who I had met a couple of times, was about as exciting as his name would suggest, seemingly determined to make up for his wife’s abundance of personality by surgically expunging his own. He worked for one of the Big Four accountancy firms, and had accordingly done rather well for himself. Well enough, in fact, to justify a second home in one of the villages outside Cambridge a year or so ago. Britta now spent most of her time here, helping to run one of the local theatres. 

            Since we left university, as well as attaining the matrimonial hand of this well-heeled bean counter, Britta had acquired herself a pair of rumbustious twin sons, now aged four, and, more critically from my perspective, a car, which seemed rather older. The plan was that she would drive me up to our digs for the night, on the other side of town beyond Castle Hill, following which we would stroll down the hill to The Baron of Beef and crack on with the mid-afternoon boozing and reminiscing. 

            Britta had studied English, and as such, having never delved into Sinclair’s murky world of murder and mayhem, she and the professor knew each other by sight but not to speak to. As such, once we were through the barrier, he nodded at her politely before gesturing vaguely in the direction of a new hotel which appeared to have sprung up since I had been away.

            “I have an appointment at the Tamburlaine,” he declared grandly as we belatedly took the opportunity to exchange business cards before he started tottering off with his tuba. 

“Perhaps we’ll bump into each other over the course of the weekend,” he called back over his shoulder, “but if not, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” 

            I grinned back at him, but pointedly avoided making any such rash pledge. After all, for all I knew the old boy might have turned into some sort of radical vegan mineral water drinker, although given the number of formal halls he presumably had to attend as fellow and “Mistress” of St Crisps, this seemed rather far-fetched.

            Left alone, Britta and I exchanged a warm hug and wandered into the car park in search of her Mini Cooper, a typically eccentric choice of vehicle which I imagine her husband had tried to talk her out of purchasing. If such a disagreement had indeed occurred, however, it did not surprise me that Britta had got the better of it. Britta was, and had always been, a force of nature.

            Born to a Danish mother and an English father (a diplomat) Britta had been bounced around all over the place as a girl attending various international schools all over Europe and in the US. Her parents had later divorced fairly ignominiously and she had once told me that Cambridge was the first place where she had ever felt truly settled. 

            Our crowd was a close knit one, although there had initially been a bit of a divide into sub-groups between the “lads”, who tended to spend most of our spare time mooching around in pubs, and the “girls”, whose tastes were a bit more wide ranging). This unspoken divide had inevitably diminished as we progressed through our undergraduate years and thereafter, and gradually grew to regard such a division as just a little bit arbitrary and childish. Britta, however, gloriously profane and impressively uninhibited, had always behaved like one of the boys anyway. As I remarked in Fresher’s Week, using a line that at the time I doubtless thought would cause Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw to rest just a little more uneasily in their graves, “Britta has no filter”. Boom, and indeed, tish.

            “So on a scale of “One to Newsnight Review”, how patronising was Miss Fritton on your journey up?” Britta asked me as soon as (or, in my estimation, actually slightly before) Sinclair was safely out of earshot. 

            We had given Sinclair this somewhat undignified nickname during our undergraduate years due to his bearing, even in his thirties, a slight resemblance to that glorious character actor and occasional cross-dresser of yesteryear, Alastair Sim. Shockingly, only about three of us had understood the reference, but that had been enough for the name to stick. 

            I waited a moment or two before responding, knowing that my voice tends to carry, especially when I least want it to.

            “Oh he’s all right in a pompous sort of way,” I pronounced generously. “Much less scary when he’s not armed with the infamous red pen of doom!”

            “So how the devil are you?” Britta asked me as she unlocked her car door. Short and sturdy, she had always been a surprisingly fast walker for one her size, and she had bustled through the car park so quickly that despite being a full foot taller than her and presumably having at least six inches of extra leg, I had struggled to keep up. 

            “You’re looking well, anyway,” she complimented me. This was a lie. Even my oldest brother, who is so large that his colleagues have started calling him “Sean Coronary”, had started teasing me about the rapidity with which I had started piling on the pounds. 

            “How long has it been?” she went on, gesturing for me to get into the car, having first cleared my seat of several heartily chewed toddler and/or pet toys.

            “Um...” I paused for thought. Compared to others in my social circle, I had done a reasonable job of keeping up with Britta, who had maintained a relatively constant Facebook and Instagram presence. I am a dabbler in the former but my efforts on Instagram consist of one solitary photograph of a bloody good gelateria in Barcelona that I am determined not to forget the name of. Twitter I gave up on long ago. If you have a family history of high blood pressure, twittering and lawyering is just about the worst combo imaginable.

            “Well let’s narrow it down,” she suggested helpfully. “Have you met my children?”

            “Oh, er, yes.”

            “How large were they?” I gave an approximate indication with my hands before clambering into her tiny car.

            “I was able to get one twin on each knee,” I suggested, as Britta turned on the ignition and started pulling away before I had even started scrambling around for the seatbelt. I had forgotten how terrifying she was as a driver. “What have you done with them, anyway?”

            “They’re with Neil’s parents for the weekend”, she responded, as she narrowly avoided causing the first recorded death in this story as a cyclist whizzed through the nerve-wrackingly narrow gap between her car and the pavement. 

“F*****g cyclists”, she hissed, terrifyingly, as I clutched tightly to the edge of my seat. The one positive thing about hitching a ride with Britta was that at least the ride was likely to be safer for me, on the inside of her car, than for the poor sods on the outside.

            “Surely you must get used to them now you’re living in this neck of the woods,” I suggested tentatively.

            “Never”, she responded in what I can only describe as a snarl. 

“Virtue signalling b******s!” she added, rather emphatically, before ramming her fist onto the car horn and giving it some serious welly.

            “Is Neil joining us this evening?” I asked, mustering as much enthusiasm as I could manage at the thought of the company of her singularly tedious husband. I am no master of the art of small talk, as you have probably already gathered, but Neil was a veritable black hole of banter.

            “Let’s just say he’ll be dipping in and out,” Britta replied, more quietly. “He’s really busy with some big corporate deal at work. Plus the presence of two of my exes plus a bunch of my friends who he hardly knows isn’t exactly going to encourage him to throw himself wholeheartedly into the party. He feels like enough of a fish out of water when it’s his own friends we’re meeting, and let’s face it, we’re a bit of a clique, Rog.”

            “So Matt and Robbie are both coming then? I texted both of them about our upcoming shindig a week or so ago, but Robbie was non-committal and Matt never responded at all.”

            “Robbie was probably waiting to see if Tanya was going,” Britta surmised. “And you know what Matt’s like.”

            I did. Dark haired, saturnine and, if you’re into that sort of thing, devilishly good looking, Matt Sampson had been one of the most brilliant law students in our year and was now knocking it out of the park as a family law barrister. I suspected that with his brain he could have been raking it in by now in one of the more lucrative branches of the law, or, if he’d gone down my route of selling his soul to “the man” and becoming a solicitor, rather than being self-employed, as all barristers technically are, he would have been tailor made for an early partnership.

            Intense, mercurial, and prone to mood swings, Matt was nevertheless one of the most stimulating companions I had ever known. He was however somewhat insistent on doing everything on his own terms, including when it came to keeping in contact with those, like myself, who considered him to be one of his closest friends. It was always him who initiated contact, and whenever I tried to do so I found myself ignored, and when he got back in touch later there was never any acknowledgement of the times when I had tried to do so. With anyone else I would have assumed that I was being given a hint, but then he was so fervently interested in everything I had to say when I did meet up with him that I soon forgot about his flakiness. Besides, I knew that others had received exactly the same treatment. It was just Matt’s way.

            “One of the best mates I’ll ever have, Matt,” I admitted, popping a polo into my mouth. I never travel without them - a combination of an unfortunate proneness to morning breath and an eternally optimistic libido. “But I remain absolutely amazed that you put up with him for so long.”

            “Well what can I say? Best sex I ever had,” Britta admitted cheerfully.

            The polo went down the wrong way. 

            When my spluttering had subsided and I realised that I was not actually about to choke to death on my ill-timed mint, I found time to feel ever so slightly offended. It occurred to me that Britta might not actually remember it, given how utterly pixilated the pair of us had been on the evening in question, but there had been one glorious night, back in 2004 (in between Robbie and Matt) when...well, you get the gist. The following morning she had told me, with her typical forthrightness and marked absence of tact, that it had been a horrible mistake and that I was never to speak of it again. 

            Which was fair enough, I had concluded, too much of a coward to ask her to elaborate any further on why she had taken that view of things (very wisely, looking back on it, as she might actually have given me an honest answer, and I was rather prone to self-pity in those days!) Reasonably attractive though she was, Britta had never been one of my hopeless crushes, and so our friendship had continued much the same as before.

            “Until I met my husband of course,” she added, too late. Far too late. “And...ooh! S**t!” 

         “Indeed!” I agreed pointedly.

            “You were probably in the top ten, Rog,” she ventured in an attempt to mollify my wounded ego, an effort that was entirely forlorn given that I had known her, and been in her confidence, for long enough to be reasonably sure that she had only ever had seven or eight partners. 

            “Jolly good,” I replied, benevolently putting a brave face on the fact that this reunion had already been rather more revelatory than I had been expecting. 

 

            Fortunately, given that it was Britta I was dealing with, the ensuing awkward silence was short lived, and we were babbling away merrily about (different) old times again well before she found a parking spot in one of the little residential roads leading off Huntingdon Road, beyond Castle Hill, which was where St Crispian’s College’s new accommodation had been built. Yes, we really were turning the nostalgia dial up to eleven, for our good friend Ed Dickinson, the self-designated organiser of this proud reunion, had booked us into college accommodation, albeit not accommodation we had ever stayed in before. 

            Back in my day (if you’ll forgive such an expression from someone who isn’t eighty years old and a lifelong tobacco chewer) they hadn’t even had enough rooms for all the undergraduates, and we’d had to go private in our third year. Now they were even able to cater for the postgrads, and, during the holidays, paying guests like ourselves as well, via this new accommodation which even had its own Porter’s Lodge, with the Porters dividing their time between this one and its larger sibling down the hill. It was a cheaper option than most of the hotels in town, albeit from my previous experience of college accommodation I was expecting something rather more Spartan. In the event, the quality of the rooms (most of which, including mine, were even en suite) turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The quality of our welcome at the reception desk, decidedly less so.

            “Hello, Gavin,” I said as jovially as I was able to as my old nemesis, Gavin the Porter (I had never discovered his surname and had never been entirely convinced that he’d had one) emerged from the back room of the brand spanking new Porter’s Lodge to greet Britta and grunt at me, after the statutory three second stare as he pretended to remember who I was. This was something that might have been forgivable after fifteen years, had he not insisted on going through the same rigmarole when he was seeing me practically every day in the 2003-2006 era. 

            Britta, in contrast, had always had an enviable ability to sweet talk every one of St Crispian’s motley crew of Porters into an affectionate paternalism, even those whose demeanours normally suggested that they had received an inoculation against the dangerous effects of undergraduate charm. She had even, as I understood it, stayed in touch with them afterwards. A couple of them were even on Facebook, which to me was tantamount to discovering that Mr Bumble from Oliver Twist has an Instagram account and is regularly taking cheeky selfies with his favourite workhouse boys.

           

Now presumably in his mid to late fifties, Gavin was a short, stocky man who, unless Britta or one of his other favourites was around, bore a perennially sour expression on his agate-hard face. His slicked back hair was now thinner and greying, but I noted that he was still applying more grease to what remained of it than you would find on the floor of Cambridge’s finest late night chip vans. For all I know, that might have been where he was sourcing it from - certainly the smell was suggestive. Otherwise he appeared to me to be virtually unchanged.

            The Porter gave Britta a hug and a very continental four kisses on the cheek, something he had probably learned from the “incredibly hot French wife” who he had taken such pride in showing us inappropriate photos of at the drop of a hat when we were undergraduates. Or at least some of us. I had never got a look in, and had had no particular desire to. I think it was safe to assume that this marriage had not been a love match, and I suspected that he had probably traded her in for a younger model by now. How chaps like him get away with it, I will never understand. If Gavin was a silver fox, he was the scruffy, mangy bin raiding variety rather than the George Clooney breed. But (and forgive the cliché, but many a true word is spoken in platitudes) there is no accounting for taste.

            “That bearded prick’s been in already,” Gavin muttered. “F****r had the audacity to ask me to pass on a message!”

            I grinned. Neither of us had any difficulty unravelling the mystery of which bearded prick he was referring to. In Gavin the Porter’s universe, Dan Finn was “the” bearded prick. Whilst I have already alluded to the fact that Gavin held me in undisguised contempt, his feelings towards Dan would be more accurately described as being along the “burning, seething enmity” lines. Dan had already texted both Britta and myself to notify us that he was holed up in The Baron, but of course he had not passed up the chance that the fates had thrown his way to antagonise his old sparring partner and had seized the opportunity to foist an entirely pointless task on him.

            Dan (Finn, a wastrel) and The Baron (of Beef, a pub) had between them played a worryingly significant part in my undergraduate experience. It was not until long after I had left Cambridge that I had discovered that, far from being a member of the nobility with a rather peculiar fiefdom, The Baron of Beef was in fact a technical term for a joint of beef comprising the two sirloins joined at the backbone. 

            In case that cut of deliciously pointless trivia is not enough for you, I had also discovered that that terrific goggle eyed boozehound, Tom Baker, had rented the room above that very same establishment when filming the Douglas Adams penned Doctor Who story “Shada” back in the 1970s. Tom’s subsequent departure to other galaxies must have left a gaping hole in the landlord’s bank balance, but Dan and I (with Britta and others) had done our best to make up the shortfall. 

Dan, never a man to hang about dry lipped when there was drinking to be done, had clearly already been there for a while when we arrived, having left nothing to chance and staked out (pardon the pun) our old regular table by the window, at the front. Dan, who had studied History of Art as an undergraduate, had left with the rest of us in 2006. He had then wasted no time in making a small fortune by inventing an app of some kind just a couple of years later. He has tried to explain the details to me on a number of occasions but I’m still utterly baffled, but whatever the hell it does, it enabled him to effectively retire in his mid-twenties. I am unlikely to ever forgive the lucky b*****d for this.

            After much bumming around as he gradually spent what he described as his “winnings”, he had decided that he really, really enjoyed being a student (the lifestyle at least - I had never seen much evidence of actual studying going on). In light of this epiphany he had come back to his roots, successfully applying first for a Master’s degree and then a PhD at good old St Crisps. The latter he had completed last year, meaning that he now had more letters after his name than in his name.

            Dan had always had a certain effortlessly cool vibe about him. His interests ranged well beyond his chosen field of study, and he had a particular interest in economics, geopolitics and philosophy. On the economic/geopolitical side, I’m afraid that my contribution to these discussions tended to be limited to popping up like a pink muppet and singing “do doo do doo doo” every time he mentioned the well-known FT writer Anand Menon. On the philosophical front I was even more clueless, but then that went for most of the rest of us as well. Dan was known for regularly taking pleasure in lobbing a grenade into a conversation by throwing in an obscure reference to some Kant or other, then sitting back and gleefully watching the rest of us pretend we had the vaguest idea of what he was on about. Although he would never admit it, there was no question in my mind that the philosopher whose teachings “Dr Dan” had chosen to live his life by was not Nietzsche or Socrates but one Baloo the Bear (Disney’s version obviously, not the slightly grumpier, punchier Kipling original). 

            Two activities that had never featured heavily in Dan’s Bare Necessities of Life were shaving and haircuts. Shoes had also been very much optional (he might, if pushed, have been prepared to dust off his second best pair of sandals for a Formal Hall). This look was one he had effortlessly carried off as an undergraduate, but now the ravages of early middle age had set in, so as Britta and I trundled into The Baron some twenty minutes or so after dropping our stuff off, I was rather surprised to be greeted by a Goth Falstaff. 

            I had been in Cambridge less than an hour but I had already seen enough of its inhabitants to know that this was not a particularly uncommon look in this neck of the woods these days, but it was not one I would have associated with someone approximately my own age. We’re not kids any more, I thought, not for the last time that weekend. The world is taking its toll.

            “All right, guys?” Dan beamed at us, making a movement that suggested that he was getting up to greet us, but without actually going to the trouble of doing so. “Rog, get them in?” 

A familiar refrain. Dutifully, I let Britta sit down and then navigated my way to the bar.

            I may have already alluded to the fact that I am a large, clumsy and ungainly fellow whose spatial awareness is not always all that it could be. The Baron of Beef, although colourfully characterful, is not one of Cambridge’s larger pubs, and although it was far from full at this time of day, I still managed to jostle someone on my way to the bar.

            “Hey! Watch yersel’, big feller!” snapped a familiar Glaswegian voice. I turned to find myself staring at Donald Campbell, ex-Head Porter at St Crisps. Like most of our Porters, he was ex-army. I wasn’t sure what Gavin’s background had been, as even people he liked tended to struggle to steer any conversation with him away from his wife’s b***s, but I was guessing that some sort of renegade gun running to one of the nastier African warlords had probably featured. 

            It was almost certainly fair to say, though, that few of our bowler hatted band of brothers had had as tough a time of it as Falklands vet Campbell, who had come from a long line of war heroes, I am told that it was Campbell Senior who, when Hitler’s invasion of France in 1940 proved successful, is reputed to have said that “if the English surrender as well, we could have a real fight on our hands!”

Personally I had rather liked him. We had got on surprisingly well considering the disparity between our relative life experiences, and I had been saddened, if not particularly surprised, to learn that he had been sacked a couple of years later for assaulting a particularly obnoxious postgraduate, who we had nicknamed “The Worm” and who had combined the worst characteristics of Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones and Richard E Grant’s Withnail. Donald Campbell loved his college, his country and the children he barely ever got to see, and was in many ways an admirable citizen who had tried exceptionally hard to reintegrate himself into civilian society after his return from the horrors of war. But ultimately the self-control wasn’t there, certainly not enough to rein in the anger, depression and self-loathing which had come to govern his life like the three heads of Cerberus. Campbell had had plenty of warnings, and “The Worm”, despicable fellow though he was, had just been the wafer thin mint that caused the explosion.

            Campbell’s abrupt dismissal had come as a huge body blow to the poor troubled fellow. He had loved the job with a passion that was almost unnerving. On our first week he had declared, apropos of nothing, in the middle of our fire safety training, that he would “f*****g die for this college”. There had been a gleam in his eye at the time that had suggested that if anyone spoke ill of the college or made fun of his fanatical dedication to it, he would not hesitate to rip out their livers and shove them down their throats.

            I had still been regularly popping back to Cambridge at the time of Campbell’s ignominious sacking, as a welcome break from the real world that was proving so overwhelming and “unbubbly”. I remembered the heartbreaking sight of Campbell coming back in to the Porter’s Lodge when I was visiting, exchanging gossip with Tubby Trevor, a jolly giant a couple of years off retirement who had stepped in as his temporary replacement. It struck me that the ex-Porter had been savouring any scraps he could still get his teeth into from a life that was no longer his. Last I heard, he was working in security somewhere. God help anyone stupid enough to try and burgle it, wherever it was.

            Now about sixty and bright red in the face, Campbell had clearly been drinking heavily for some hours. I greeted him as “Mr Campbell” and he squinted suspiciously at me for a few seconds, without a glimmer of recognition. Well, it had been almost fifteen years since he had clapped eyes on me, so it was hardly surprising that he did not remember me, let alone any affection he might once have had for me, which was unlikely to make up for the fact that I had just spilled his pint. I took the only decent (safe) option open to me and offered to buy him another.

            “Aye, I’ll have a double vodka and cranberry juice, if ye’re offerin’!” I was pretty sure he was daring me to snigger at this point - I managed to limit myself to a nervous squeak disguised as a sneeze. “And another pint for my pal here!” 

He gestured over to a corner, where I was astonished to see Saddam Hussein nursing a pint of Guinness.

            Now before you start to worry that this tale is going off at a tangent you weren’t expecting when you picked it out of the shelves, equivalent to Mussolini turning up at St Mary’s Mead and taking tea with Miss Marple, I will admit that it was not actually the former Iraqi dictator sitting there staring at me suspiciously with Guinness foam on his moustache, and I was, of course, perfectly capable of telling the difference (everyone knows the real Saddam was more of a Murphy’s man). I should also clarify that the incarnation of Saddam that this fellow bore the closest resemblance to was not the lusciously moustached psychopath in his prime but the scruffy bearded fellow that they pulled out of the hole after it had all gone a bit Pete Tong for him. 

            None of us knew what “Saddam’s” real name was but his face was familiar to us as he had been a regular frequenter of The Baron and its neighbour, The Mitre, during our student days, usually sitting alone clutching a beer in one hand and the plastic bag containing his dinner in the other, or occasionally fraternising with some similarly dishevelled characters. Given the state he had been in back then, I was somewhat surprised to see that he was still alive, let alone virtually unchanged, and equally surprised to see that he was a chum of Donald Campbell (a testament to how the illustrious former Head Porter had fallen since his unfortunate defenestration).

            I brought the drinks for this unlikely pair of drinking comrades over to their table and was rewarded with a moderately appreciative grunt from Campbell and a scowl from Mr Hussein. Taking the hint with some degree of relief, I scampered back over to my friends with my tray of drinks, somehow managing to avoid knocking anyone over for a change. By this time, Ed Dickinson had joined us and indeed had managed to procure himself a pint already.

            Ed Dickinson was a very difficult person to dislike if he had not given you a reason to do so. Another of our fraternity of lawyers, he had given up on the dog eat dog world of transactional work a couple of years ago to become a professional support lawyer in the weird, wonderful and thrillingly edge of your seat field of corporate tax. For those uninitiated into the legal world, professional support lawyers are basically the lawyers who tell lawyers like me what the law is, keeping abreast of legal developments, drafting precedents and generally avoiding shouty clients. 

            I was slightly surprised that Ed had taken that route, as he had always been more of a people person than I am, and I would have thought he would have done quite well with his firm’s client base. But like Dan, he was a guy who really likes to avoid hassle and from the couple of times I had seen him since he had made the shift it had become abundantly clear that he was delighted by his new, comparatively stress free lifestyle, even though the change had come too late to rescue his hairline, which had started to recede even before we were out of college. 

            Ed was dressed in his trademark scruffy T-shirt, jeans and trainers and despite the fact that he couldn’t have been there for more than two minutes, he already looked like part of the furniture, laid back and confident. Ed was not a traditionally good looking guy but he had been one of the most effective and unscrupulous womanisers in college back in the day. I knew he and his wife had divorced a couple of years back so I couldn’t help wondering whether he had “plans” for the weekend - there were a couple of distinct possibilities on the guest list, although I hoped that they were now old enough to know better than to fall for his undoubted charms.

            “Was that Mad Campbell and Saddam over there?” Ed asked, somewhat incredulously.

            “It certainly was. And I had the pleasure of Miss Fritton’s company on the way up!”

            “Amazing!” Dan, who had always been the unlikeliest of Gerald Sinclair fans, clapped his hands joyfully. “Do you remember that night we got him on our quiz team?”

            I did indeed. Sinclair had seemed in equal parts bemused and delighted to have received the invitation. Needless to say, he had been worth his weight in gold in that context. The fact that he had even managed to come up with “Addicted to Bass” as the correct answer to the question “What single was No 2 in the UK Charts on 12 January 2002” was all the more remarkable given that the way he had pronounced “bass” (like the fish) suggested that he had believed it to be an ode to the art of angling. He had furthermore saved us from acute embarrassment by knowing that the correct answer to the question “Which popular film from the 1970s contains the line “What’s that got to do with my knob?”” was, of course, Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Dan had been way off-piste on that one.

            “It’s like going back in time, being here,” I commented, looking around nostalgically. “Not much changes round here, by the look of it. Except that the students are getting younger,” I added, nodding somewhat enviously in the direction of a group of four students in the table nearest to us who were nattering away, looking over at us occasionally with what appeared to be amused expressions, and drinking what appeared to be some heathen, non-calorific variant of Coca Cola.

            “They don’t drink as much as we used to,” Dan, who had had the most recent student experiences, explained, a note of slight disdain in his voice. “Work harder too.”

“Even at St Crisps?” I asked. He nodded wistfully. 

            “You’d never see any of those wet wankstains going up the bell tower after a few too many. Wouldn’t even occur to them, not under the new regime! New Master’s determined to “turn things around”, whatever that means.” He sighed. “There’s a new Senior Tutor, too, South African git called Rudi van der Westhuizen, and word has it he’s a f*****g teetotaller. College has been redeveloped too. Not sure where they got all the money from but I keep losing my bearings every time I go in there now.”

            “Blame Forsyte Markby,” Ed said. 

            “Who the f**k is he?” Dan demanded.

         “The firm I’ve been working for for the last five years, you muppet!” Ed chuckled, entirely unruffled by his old mate’s evident lack of interest in his career. “Our construction team negotiated the building contract for the job!”

            “So they’re trying to drag St Crisps into the cutting edge of the 21st century,” I concluded. “No more merrily sloshing around in the bottom 5 of the Tomkins Table for our successors then. Probably for the best, all things considered.” 

The other three, especially Dan, looked at me with shocked expressions, which would not have been out of place if I had just produced a gift-wrapped baby kitten from my pocket and then whacked it over the head with a mallet.

            “We’ve got to curb THAT attitude, mate!” Ed declared disappointedly. “I’m not having you dragging down our weekend with puritanical little outbursts like that! This has been a long time coming. We’re here to relive our youth! I’m not having you behaving like a f*****g young person!”

            “What is the plan, anyway?” I took the opportunity to ask, for Ed had been the organiser of our long-awaited gathering. Despite his outwardly laidback demeanour, Ed was actually a dynamo when it came to organising things - at university, drinks had always been in his room, and he had always been one for “structuring the fun”. 

            “All in good time, mate, all in good time,” Ed declared, taking a sizeable gulp of lager before doing his bit to set the tone of the forthcoming festivities by releasing a barrage of belches. 

             “ORDEEER!” I roared, giving the room my best impression of former Speaker John Bercow. 

“Mature, Ed,” Britta muttered, rolling her eyes. She was right - the atmosphere in the Baron had acquired the unmistakeable pungency of a particularly elderly and overripe Limburger cheese.

            “You can talk, Little Miss Cheesecutter,” Ed scoffed. “You used to fart like a brewer’s drayhorse at uni!”

            This was a not entirely unreasonable point. I had been Britta’s neighbour in our first year, and at times it had been like living next door to someone who deflated accordions for a living. 

            “At least mine didn’t get their own catchphrase,” Ed went on. “What was that line from Jason and the Argonauts you used to come out with whenever you let one go?”

            “Release the Kraken,” Britta admitted blithely. “And it was Clash of the Titans, for what it’s worth. I switched to “Make America Great Again” briefly when Trump got elected, but the mental image of that man combined with that smell was making Neil nauseous and he refused to have sex with me. At least Laurence Olivier was s**t hot when he was younger.”

            We were getting some extremely dubious looks from the smug teetotal vegan studenty types at the next table, who were probably far too young to know who Laurence Olivier was and for whom (poor souls) Clash of the Titans was undoubtedly a lacklustre Liam Neeson film with no comedy clockwork owls in it at all.

            A familiar figure darkened the doorway. Another of our motley party had arrived.

            “We’re just talking about bowel movements,” I cheerfully explained to the Right Honourable MP for Cambridge. “Pull up a pew!”