I couldn’t believe my luck: Jack Dee agreed to coach me for my big lecture in March!

In the meantime, there were some more mundane duties to attend to on campus. EH suggested that a couple of glasses of Champagne would render our morning’s work more palatable, but I cautioned against this. We should instead make better use of other perks of our job, such as EH’s access to facilities at Jesus College Oxford, and my lifetime membership of the Bodleian Library.

Our attention then turned to the party of school girls in pink gingham blouses who would soon reach the department. We could observe their route up to our lecture hall on the campus-wide CCTV system. Soon they would be with us, yet we had no idea how we would be entertaining them.

In addition we still had the question of the evening’s public lecture: who would deliver it, and what would be the theme? In the end SS suggested that EH should be the one to give the presentation, and the main topic of the day would be dental floss.