University, and Alison’s first experience of living away from home. Having grown up in the comfortable environment of a Herefordshire village, of fewer than two hundred souls, she found the bustle of the metropolis and her thirty thousand fellow students difficult to assimilate. She was studying African anthropology, which did reduce the number she came into contact with to a handful, but she found most of them so nerdish and unattractive that melancholy soon dominated her waking hours – or at least those spent outside the lecture hall or tutorial room, for she truly loved her subject and regretted not one jot her choice of degree course.

She tried to advance her social life by helping to form a new student society, composed of those members of her faculty with a particular interest in the Hottentot people, the HOTSOC, as undergraduates tend to call these things, and she was pleased to be accepted as its first secretary – the HOTSOCSEC – though her small village experience of life ill prepared her for being mis-referred to frequently as the HOTSECSOC. It did not occur to her that her title sounded to those male students of a less sheltered background like a thermal condom for use on cold winter evenings. Hot sex was as far from her thoughts as it could possibly be. At least for the first three weeks of that first term – but that’s another story.