Universities are curious, contrary institutions, and Oxford and Cambridge more curious and contrary than most. At one level they are centres of intellectual innovation and advance, places where the atom is split, new wonder-drugs developed, old orthodoxies overturned. And yet they are also the most conservative of institutions, wedded, with a fidelity which our society hardly grants to any ordinary marriage, to extraordinary rituals and ways of doing things whose sole commendation seems to be, that it has always been so.

The contradiction is more apparent than real; a strong sense of tradition is often a help, not a hindrance, to intellectual openness. But is not always easy to see how that works in practice, and much that we do and value in the ritual side of our common life has, to an unsympathetic eye, a faint air of the ridiculous about it. Today’s service is a case in point. Just what is all this about? Some of you may know the spoof commemoration-day address given by a lunatic clergyman at the beginning of W H Auden’s The Orators: