It has been a year since Alexander Ewing was able to drink free coffee

I realised the other day that it’s been roughly a year since I stopped being a junior dean, where I was in charge of student discipline.

Once in a while I miss it.

The reasons usually stem from senior common room withdrawals.

Teaching is almost unbearable without access to free high-quality caffeine.

And I felt less guilty about glancing at the Murdoch press when I was not faced with paying for it.

But nowadays, just about a year removed from the trenches, the general feeling is one of relief.

This is especially true during exam season.

The other week, one of my students (from a neighbouring college) asked me if it was true that my college (Oriel) actually burned a boat in first quad in celebration of retaining its status of Head of the River (men’s first boat).

To my great delight, I had no idea! Are they still head of the river?

Apparently. And yes they did burn a boat (an old wooden one).

In years past I was one of the few who secretly cheered any college who crossed the line ahead of our lot. Not that I was ever there to watch.

Pembroke did the business one year, if I recall correctly.

They bumped us and gave me a good night’s sleep. No celebratory rowing dinner. Or at least a less rowdy one.

To be fair, the current rowers and their mates are not the ones I worried about. It was the old boys who took a break from Barclays and Boodles to ‘show them what rowing dinners were like when we were here’.

This time-period was usually when the college had not yet gone co-educational.

Recollections of this sort remind me why it was the right time to hand in the badge.

There are always those who hang around past their sell-by date.

The power – such that it is – goes to their head.

For me, the best part of the job is helping the students (honestly), many of whom are under tremendous stress.

I could care less about wearing a particular gown or telling someone off for running on the grass.

But when should one retire?

For the junior dean this is easy: usually when we can afford to do so.

As I’ve mentioned in this space before, being a junior dean is, in many ways, a means of feeding oneself, especially in these days of increasingly precarious funding.

I’ve always frowned on those who stay in the post, even after they have secured generous post-doctorate funding elsewhere.

Some wonder how I fill the time.

But anyone who comes to visit me in Eynsham will know the answer: I spend at least an hour a day staring out of the window of an S1 bus at the changes being made to Frideswide Square.

I have come to realise that all of the ‘extra time’ gained from resigning my decanal post has contributed to a particularly acute case of ‘Stagecoach idling syndrome’.

At least the porters still let me back for a cuppa – free of charge.