Childhood friends SB and KH met me in Birmingham to scope out venues for next year’s university reunion.

We were in for a shock when we reached the University of Birmingham campus. The French department was completely unrecognisable. The corridors were so narrow that they could only be accessed single file in one direction. The reception areas and lecture halls were so huge that they gave the impression of being in open air. We also noticed that most of the students were Chinese.

Most bizarre of all was access to the main teaching block. To reach this, you had to walk through a large, high-ceilinged, hall hung with a huge electronic banner that reached from the roof to the floor. As you approached the banner, it moved backwards, with the images that it displayed changing according to your positioning in the room. We had no idea of the banner’s function. It just seemed to be yet another annoying obstacle to navigating the building.