The Spectator's Notes

David Short

I do find it bizarre that Oxford and Cambridge can enter teams from each college, but it is not true to say 'other universities can field only one team'.

The separate colleges - such as University College, Bedford College, King's College - of London University enter separate teams.

Alas, I was unable even to attempt to appear with my undergraduate college, the London School of Economics.

The LSE was banned for a number of years in the 1970s after its team made weak joke answers to Bamber Gascoigne's questions. Its team leader, John something, had a walking stick and used it to crude effect by waving it in the air. The crude effect was gained because LSE was broadcast below a girls' Oxbridge college on University Challenge's famous split screen. The girls were on top, if you see what I mean.

I was in my final year at school and had been accepted at LSE. My mother, watching it with me, declared: 'you're not going there!'.

As I was on a means-tested full grant (those were the days!), the lack of any parental contribution meant her threat lacked any power of enforcement.

But I always felt it was very unfair for Granada to ban me from something I'd aspired to for years when I was an inky swot in South Shields when the offences were committed.

At my school in those days, we could not apply to Oxbridge unless we stayed on for a seventh sixth-form term to prepare for Common Entrance.

Eating my mother out of house and home for another year was not financially practical, so I couldn't swerve to avoid the LSE ban by opting for Oxbridge and a (vastly increased) chance of getting on the split screen.

Every time I saw that John character when I arrived at LSE, I always felt like kicking his walking stick from underneath him.

Wormwood

Why has Satan been excised? Were you expecting him to appear spouting fire, threatening, enslaving in any obvious way? He was always more likely to turn up as a smiling Blairite figure, offering little compromises, easy derelictions, each time conducting us a little further on our journey... And that is what has happened to the hymn book.

Michael Prendergast

Perhaps the bowdlerizer who changed "faint" to "swerve" is a rugby playing man who confused it with "feint" -in the sense of an attempt to confuse an opponent ie "swerve"?