Congratulations Seamus Perry, this piece has an 'alpha buoyancy'

I am keeping my head down at the moment. Since I became head of faculty, my colleagues, who are nice people, have taken to stopping me in the street and asking solicitously, ‘you must be run off your feet’, ‘poor old you!’, ‘I don’t envy your lot, old man’, and the like.

Naturally I am happy to accept the implications of selfless heroism such remarks convey.

But I think that just now I am detecting a slight change in the atmosphere: for their sympathy is ever so slightly checked by the awareness that, as chair, I am not examining this year.

And they are.

Of all the duties involved in being a don, examining is the most onerous.

The rest of the things you need to do in term are still happening, so the only way I have ever found of doing it in the time allotted is by getting up at five in the morning.

And thus, in previous years, you may found me sitting in the first light at the kitchen table, blinking at a script about the Romantic poets, third cup of tea to hand, reflecting on the oddity of reading about Wordsworth’s love of nature while the dawn chorus gets cracking outside. It is a curiously crepuscular existence.

At Oxford, all scripts are marked independently and the grades separately submitted, and only then do the examiners come together to agree a score for each script.

This meeting can take ages, and though it is unusual for there to be a radical disagreement there is always room for ‘donmanship’.

In the old days, when marks were still Greek letters, the scope was simply enormous.

“A beta plus? Well, I couldn’t in good conscience go beyond beta query plus, myself.”

People would speak of “a beta script with an unmistakable alpha buoyancy”.

My old tutor once gave a “gamma-gamma-alpha” on the grounds that the script was mostly dreadful though occasionally brilliant and at no stage remotely competent.

These concentrated bursts of assessment are probably not good for the moral character. Once in the swing, you start assessing everything.

You walk down St Giles and find yourself grading the paving stones and the lamp posts.

“Hmm, slight pitch to the left, and the glass is cracked; very formulaic graffiti: overall, a rather disappointing 62.”

For most of us this unhappy phase passes as soon as the agreed marks are submitted; but in some dons it really gets into the marrow.

Maurice Bowra is said to have enjoyed grading the legs of the corps de ballet, no doubt to the discomfort of anyone sitting within earshot.

No less harrowing was my own experience in a restaurant in North Parade, when I witnessed a don-led party settling the bill.

“I hope you enjoyed the meal,” enquired the waiter.

“Ah, well,” said the don, pointing in turn at the dishes, “nine out of 10, nine out of 10, nine out of 10, and”, with a severe look over his half-moons, “two out of 10”.

The waiter braced himself: he had not expected a viva.

Seamus Perry is chairman of the board of the Oxford English Faculty