My academic career at Glasgow University ended around 40 years ago, degreeless and in abject ignominy. I’d been urged to embrace the student life and, looking back, had perhaps done so with rather too much gusto. The serious business of broadening my horizons had, regrettably, left little time to attend actual lectures. And besides, why had no-one thought to tell me that the study of English Literature wouldn’t involve, you know, attempting to write some of our own stuff? You wouldn’t send a plumber to do a plumbing studies course without giving him some on-the-job experience of the plumbing.

“When do we get to write a short story ourselves, or a wee poem,” I can still hear my 17-year-old self asking my tutor. And I can still see the look on this benign old prof’s face which suggested that he hadn’t reached his anointed academic position by having to read the doggerel of a teenage, West of Scotland Shelley. “We’re here to appreciate,” he’d told me.

And so, disillusioned, I committed myself instead to providing emotional support for my more studious friends, by ensuring they had some respite from the academic grind as a means of maintaining their good mental health.

Many years later, I’d confessed to an academic friend that I’d felt some shame at failing to complete my degree and squandering the tax-payers' money on whisky and beer. The kindly scholar then suggested that I should forget about the degree and go for a rather more audacious PhD instead. “Don’t you have to have a degree before you do a PhD,” I asked him. “And don’t you have to be at a Champions League level with a first-class one, too?” This was something that would have been beyond me, even if I had been more diligent in my academic........

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