I should never have told the Principal how I abhorred the prison service’s practice of announcing staff deaths. I complained at length about the lack of professionalism in the short e-mails that I received in my former career as a prison officer.

On this basis of my moaning the Principal ordered HR to set up a new University-wide system for disseminating news of deaths in service. As luck would have it, some poor soul in Finance died that day, so the system could be implemented immediately. In fluorescent pink writing on a restaurant blackboard kept just outside the door to the main HR office the update read “Christie from Finance has just died”.

How this system was any better than the one operated previously, I did not know. And who was Christie anyway? I trotted along the corridor to find WS, the one woman on campus who knew the answers to all my questions.