Seamus Perry takes a brief break from the chore of summer drinks

The closing of the academic year is marked by several rites of passage which would interest any anthropologist. There are retirement dinners to be eaten, and summer drinks to be drunk. Fond farewells are bade to students, and promises made to keep in touch.

If you are especially wise, this is the time to throw away a year’s accumulation of committee papers, but, failing that, gathering them into a pile at one end of the sofa always feels like a gesture towards the restitution of some long-lost order.

Conversations this year with colleagues take on a distinctive flavour.

“Going anywhere nice, Larry?” “Oh, fortnight with Moira and the kids in Provence. Then off to the Seychelles where I’m delivering a major keynote plenary.” This accompanied by a roll of the eyes as though the impositions of life were sometimes just too much.

And, of course, there are the exam results, the appearance of which, I always think, really does mark the close of play for another year.

In the old days word went round, like a political rumour, that the list had been posted.

You made your way to the Schools building in the High, stirred by a mixture of fear and hope, and there you found standing outside the grand front doors a large easel on which dozens of sheets of paper flapped in the summer breeze.

If you were searching for yourself this was naturally a momentous episode, but if you were merely a passer-by the spectacle was good tragic-comedy. The search for the right class list could be frantic.

“‘Where is PPP?” “Next to Archaeology, over there.” “No, you idiot, PPP — that’s PPE.” “Could you just stand to one side, please?” “I don’t think it’s out yet.” “What? I’m going to kill Steve.”

English was easy to find: it was the biggest bit of paper.

Once the list was located, one’s personality definitively revealed itself.

The confident began with their eyes firmly among the firsts, at the top, and then with great reluctance moved down the page progressing through the 2:1s, and then the 2:2s, their incredulity at the folly of life mounting all the time.

The self-doubting, by contrast, set their gaze low, among the small cluster of forlorn thirds, gradually raising their sights, like Dante moving through Purgatory, and arriving (if their luck was in) at the Paradisal top of the sheet, amazed by the inscrutable goodness that seemed to run the universe after all.

The arrangement is quite different now: students log separately into their university account and look up their result once prompted by an email.

No doubt the system had to be changed for some good reason or another; and it was, I admit, a slightly exposed way of learning your fate.

But still, this seems to me a development so entirely in keeping with the atomising spirit of the age that I cannot but deplore it.

A communal experience has been privatised into the defining solitude of modern life: being alone with a computer.