St. Mary's College was a women-only contituent college of the University of Durham, where, once a year, they held the Mary's Day Dinner. I was invited to the 1977 Mary's Day Dinner by three different Mary's students. How did I move from the hopeless romantic pining of my mid-teens to this popularity with women at 18? Sadly, it wasn't sexual charisma. I was known to have a girlfriend back home in Sheffield. My prospective partners for the evening had boyfriends tucked away far from Durham. I was safe, and that is not always as flattering as it sounds. So I went with all three. What a great evening. Low-commitment recreational dating (not necessarily with multiple partners), with only a delightful, subtle, sexual undercurrent, that wasn't going anywhere, was new to me. When I should have been experiencing it, earlier in my teens, I so longed for love, deep and overwhelming, that I was stymied.

The after-dinner speaker was a small man with a beard who talked about being a vegetarian (after we'd just downed platefuls of steak). He was clever, a little supercilious, and knew how to cause indigestion. I wasn't persuaded though. A year later I gave an after-dinner speech and stole some of his jokes. Recast in a carnivorous setting, they were completely benign.