It was apparent I was now the target of the Bugle’s rabid ire, despite Conor’s gallant efforts to distract them from my college record. Even a knight in shining ginger armour such as he was unable to wield his broadsword against his liege and his deputy liege with any degree of decapitatory success. One sticks one’s head jauntily above a parapet for just one millisecond and the wrath of the detritus of Fleet Street is arrayed pestilently against it, I thought. Conor told me I was likely to be branded in print some flavour of sex pest with the stage-whispered subtext that I was preying upon the youth of St Paul’s. Via some lollipop-based subterfuge, perhaps, or promises of grade advancement according to some tariff of services. Frankly, nothing could have been more distant from the actuality. The students at St Paul’s were far too tickled preying upon each other, and ordering in from sundry other colleges, to have any special regard for me. My rapidly decaying flesh and accreting gut held no allure when the first flush was, as it were, on tap.
