My uncle Ian enjoyed asking his younger brother, my late father, when that wastrel Niall would leave college and get a real job. The implication was that, by becoming an academic, I had essentially failed to grow up. I sometimes think Uncle Ian was right.
One of the attractions of university life to me was precisely that academic jobs were not like real jobs. At Oxford my tutors inhabited large, wood-panelled studies with towering bookcases and mullioned windows. They wore not suits but old tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows.
For roughly half the year the dons had to put up with undergraduates knocking on their doors with hastily written essays to be discussed. During the vacations, however, they were free to do