In the Cambridge market square, there was an old brass fountain, tarnished with age and gummed up with drinking straws and cigarette butts and always smelling of urine. Drunks lolled on its steps, cradling tins of Carlsberg Special Brew or bottles of Anglia Sherry. The story was that one of them was a former don, an eccentric figure with his paunch and wild, grey hair and one of those plaid American hunting caps with the flaps at the sides. He was always shaking, as if shivering away some attack, or perhaps it was the DTs. Reputedly he’d been a brilliant philosophy lecturer, the protégé of Wittgenstein himself. Now, for the price of a pint, the master’s one-time heir would recite the first five pages of Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus.

I believed the story while finding it at the same time utterly unfeasible. I didn’t see how anyone could snap so absolutely: at least I wouldn’t. The world was there to be conquered, if you were any good. Failure could be handled, indeed must be handled; as Noël Coward had said, success was merely the infinite capacity for dealing with it. I was against moral slipping or any seepage of morale. I didn’t believe in leaky boats.

I owed the college £652.75.