In the early 18th century the notable Oxford Anglo-Saxonist Edward Thwaites decided he needed his leg amputated. His chosen London surgeon baulked at the danger of the proposed operation, only to be rebuked by this hardy scholar: “I came to London on purpose to have my leg cut off, and off it shall go; and if you will not do it, lend me your tools and I will do it myself.”

So off it came, apparently without Thwaites uttering a sound. But after the operation Thwaites’s cauteries burst, and so Thwaites “takes his handkerchief, and with a bed staff twists it as hard as he could upon the end of the stump, rammed his fingers into the mouths of the arteries like spickets”, and calmly called for his surgeon to return.

Do we believe this? There is something about the bone-crunching industry of that generation of Oxford Saxonists, with their obsessive zeal for the ancient northern languages of Europe, so often yoked to an equally strenuous commitment to the pig-headed principles of the Non-Juring movement, which renders the anecdote just about plausible.

It’s getting cold and my circulation is dreadful for a thirty-something: I pondered my yellow-white fingers the other day and thought of Thwaites and his amputation.

The clocks have carried out their own annual rebuke, and Proserpina is back in the Underworld. Our recent storm the weathermen with their dark wit dubbed ‘St Jude’, after the patron saint of hopeless causes, and ‘things almost despaired of’.

Hey Jude, I am a hopeless cause, I am almost despairing. It’s a ghastly term: the awfulness that is Oxford admissions leers at me, beckoning me like some Potiphar’s Wife to its ninth-week bed, as I cower here in fifth week, not wanting to go on.

I fret beside wet trees, pondering the glacial slacking of interest in and from peers and pupils alike, that icy slide which comes for us all in this cursed trade. I am not yet in the freezer of public regard, but I look about me, and I see the future.

The other day I was cycling tetchily by the Parks imagining with forensic glee the death of one of the most offensively boring men in Oxford; at that moment he glided by, in similar colours, and with a self-same look on his face — and I had a brief ‘Shelley-sees-his-double-before-his-death’ moment.

I was depressed. I tried to cheer myself up by cheapo book-shopping, and decided to ‘work’ the charity shops in an orderly sequence from one end of Cowley to the other of Summertown.

As I peered at rows of brightly-coloured spines in the Oxfam bookshop on St Giles, I felt just a little warmed as I stood in the classic literature section, and thought how nice some of the books looked, and that somehow learning might not always be bloodied with mess of amputated academic minds.

A young girl and her father were standing beside me, and she looked happy too, even interested.

“Darling, they are all dead, these people, you do realise that?” her father tactfully murmured. “Oh,” she said, disappointed, and they moved on.

My arteries burst; call for the surgeon.