A teacher at my school thought that everyone does their best work under exam conditions. That’s a stretch, but I should think quite a lot do, more, probably, than believe it of themselves. It’s just you and your opponent at the board and you’re trying to prove something.

I’m told that there’s a reluctant return to in-person exams, because the only way to stop the kids cheating. Since passing exams is the only thing I have ever been even slightly good at, I’m undismayed by this development, but it made me think of the phenomenon of inadvertent plagiarism, a concept completely and utterly original to me, identified by my mind alone.

For a long time I confidently and sincerely believed that I had invented the phrase “Shut up, he explained”. At some point I was disabused. There again, the thought that Smack my Bitch Up is a deplorable title for a song, because, however post-modern and ironic, it will be seen by impressionable young men who will get the idea that it’s OK to end a sentence with a preposition, I always assumed I must have borrowed. But it looks as if it might be mine after all. I thought “crumbles at the touch of the slightest philosophy” was Hume, but he wrote “destroyed by the slightest philosophy”, and mine is better, I think.

A friend of mine and I once had an idea for a musical which answered the question who really wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare: a team of monkeys employed by Bill for the purpose, working on typewriters in sweatshop conditions. They go on strike, so Shakespeare writes rubbish like Romeo and Juliet and The Merry Wives of Windsor, before he realizes he’s no good at this play-writing lark, and begs the monkeys to come back, and they knock out Hamlet and King Lear. We came up with it while moving huge bound volumes of the Times around in the wine cellars of All Souls. I’m pretty sure.