We knew that KMcM lived and worked in Spain, so it came as no surprise to find her in a hotel ballroom delivering a presentation on timeshares in a long shimmery black backless dress that showed off her tan. We hadn’t seen her since Birmingham University days, and although she was a little wider in the hips, she was easily recognisable.

I sat in KMcM’s audience next to a woman from the University of Hertfordshire who asked my advice on modularisation. I started to run through all the reasons why modularisation is a wholesale disaster until she interrupted me to explain that the students on her programme would be taking just big fat module per year. This didn’t sound like modularisation to me, and none of the concerns that I had just expressed were applicable.

Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of tea, coffee and coconut cakes brought into the room by Spanish students. EH and I wandered over to the trolley to help ourselves to refreshments. I was deeply disappointed that the flasks only contained dregs of coffee.