No, we cannot believe Seamus Perry is quite that old either!

My students are getting ready for their finals. The English exams are always among the first to start, which is often a cause of disgruntlement.

But then, as I tell them, the plus side comes afterwards: while the chemists and classicists continue to sweat in subfusc over their desks, my students embark on a blissful month of sunny indolence, lying on the grass with a glass of something and a well-intentioned but untouched copy of Proust by their side.

Life sometimes appears a steady downhill course thenceforth.

Preparation for finals involves revision tutorials. These are a departure from normal tutorials.

Usually one strives to maintain an approximately Socratic level of discourse rising, if the wind is behind you, to utterances such as “but, Felicity, is Pope’s manner not, in the end, too simply facetious for us to credit him as a moralist?”.

In revision tutorials the mode is rather different: “Here, you’d better mention that essay by Jones or they’ll think you’re just nicking his argument.”

The ‘they’ in question are the examiners — “cruel inquisitive They”, as Auden put it.

Students habitually imagine their examiners as cruelly forensic inquisitors who pore over scripts to root out error and misjudgment.

In truth, most are well-disposed but weary people who, long embarked upon their middle years, would rather be watching Countryfile.

Still it is an important part of the job and everyone takes it seriously, though only the seriously odd actually look forward to the immense pile of scripts landing in their pigeonhole.

I found myself at the bus stop the other day, as you do, thinking of some lines of Philip Larkin. “I have started to say,/’A quarter of a century’/Or ‘thirty years back’/about my own life.”.

Larkin goes on: “It makes me breathless.”

Wondering why I was thinking of those lines, I remembered that the day before I had seen a student for a revision tutorial and suddenly realised that it was — good Lord, can that be right? — a quarter of a century since I had taken my finals myself.

Larkin is absolutely right: the moment when your autobiographical time begins to morph into historical time does make you gasp.

But then life as a don is full of such self-catching moments, largely consisting, as it does, in contemplating younger, more hopeful, and generally more prepossessing versions of yourself.

My experience of finals was not very memorable.

I left the Shakespeare paper thinking I had quite probably written more dazzlingly on the subject than anyone since Dr Johnson: it turned out to be my worst mark, of course, which just goes to show, oh, something or other.

As it happened, I was the only student to sit the Romantic prose option on a long hot Saturday morning, so there was no room for comfort when the examiners’ report subsequently noted that the paper was not answered well and that, if I remember correctly, “a flashy style could not disguise a basic penury of knowledge”.

A fair cop, I thought.