Old pals, Old Palace

When Fr. Felix Stephens and I were in the same house at school, we scrambled to get the county cricket scores, he supporting Gloucestershire and I Warwickshire. Bumping into him in Oxford on Sunday morning after a long gap, neither of us had anything to say about the dismal performance by England's batsmen in Abu Dhabi.

It was chance that took Caroline and me to the Catholic Chaplaincy for Mass, and chance also that Felix happened to be preaching: the desert and the marketplace was his theme - expounded at rather greater length than I'm currently used to sitting through, but probably not so fully as in the discourses we were subjected to when I was an undergraduate (and Fr. Michael Hollings the Chaplain).

Felix, evidently not at present able to live up to his name, hinted that, not just he but all of Oxford was seething at the decision to withdraw him from his post as Master of St Benet's at the end of the current academic year.