After I returned to Oxford from that 1973 summer break, I have no record of travel away from Oxford in the Michaelmas term, except that at the very end I went for a lunch party to Evenlode given by an older man from Merton, Joseph Egerton, who like me did no better at the Union than get onto Standing Committee, which I achieved at the end of this Michaelmas Term.

His parents lived in a lovely village in Gloucestershire called Evenlode, and when he heard I was going to stay on at Univ in the vacation he suggested I come there for a few days. I refused but then I fell very ill when back in College and took up his suggestion when he repeated it, so I could convalesce. That illness I should note also helped me get better acquainted with Robert Scoble, one of the friends with whom I spent much time over the next two years.

He was an Australian, who had wanted to meet me because he had gathered I too was devoted to literature about Oxford, and between us we had founded the Vile Bodies, the most celebrated in those days of Oxford Dining Societies. Our first dinner had been in the Michaelmas Term, and then he too visited me when I was ill, which was most welcome in the days when most students had gone away and the city was empty. I still recall his visits to Helen’s Court, the enclave with central heating to which those left in the vacation were sent when the water was turned off elsewhere.

But in between those days in Helen’s Court I went to Evenlode, for a very pleasant stay. And on Christmas day, after lunch there, Joseph drove me into Oxford so I could go to the Cawkwells for Christmas dinner. Boxing Day was with Leslie and his parents, with the pantomime as in the previous year, and then I had a few days in London. I stayed with the Gooneratnes since one of my fellow Classicists, Reggie Oliver, had asked me for a New Year’s Eve party at his house in Avenue Road, a few doors down from theirs. I went to the  theatre while in London, for several plays and an opera, ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’, and I also saw a London Club for the first time. This was the Liberal Club, which I was to know well in later years, and I went with a school friend of mine from Sri Lanka. I believe this was Harin Dias whose mother was English, and who had now come over himself for university in England.

In the first week of January I also went for a weekend to Michael in Berkhamsted. I knew his parents too for it was with them I had been to the Dordogne in France. But I saw just one I think of the school friends who had been with us, for they and Michael now moved in different worlds, and that summer holiday had been in a sense his farewell to them.

The pictures are of Michael and me in the Dordogne and of Robert and me a decade later in Sri Lanka.