In the 1720s Count Tommaso Sandi commissioned a cycle of five paintings to decorate his family’s palace in Venice. Three of the paintings were by the Rococo Artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and the other two by Nicol Bambini. Six months ago Sotheby’s in Milan auctioned the paintings for a record price to an anonymous buyer…the King of Nickel Angelo Guido Terruzzi…who paid four million pounds for the pleasure of adding to the 4000 works in his £350 million art collection.

Last month the paintings went on display at the privately-owned Cavalieri Hilton Hotel in Rome in the opening round of a Battle Royal to house the Terruzzi Collection. The province of Veneto has reopened a bid to house it in Venice, Milan is rumoured to be interested and there are whispers about a palazzo in Rome.

I know all this because a recent Italian Auction Record in The Times chanced to catch my eye because it was authored by Colin Gleadell who was ‘in my year’ at Churchill College…and remembered chiefly for the occasion he turned his Frank Zappa Poster to face outwards onto Storey’s Way. Such an act by a student in the Revolutionary Sixties provoked the College’s Ruling Council…after due diligence…to command its reversal or removal. Mr. Zappa was seated upon the toilet and actively engaged in doing what is done on toilets many millions of times each day.

Some people devote their lives to their old school or college. They return for the annual Founder’s Day Dinner and dine at Top Table twice a year. At the pinnacle of their Extra-Curricula Career they gratefully accept the honour bestowed upon them and become Honorary Secretary of the Old Boys’ Benevolent Society. The rest of us are only aware of such activities because a goodly proportion of the mail dropping through the letter box…or PO Box in my case…is high-class junk mail from institutions like Christ’s Hospital, Churchill College and Cambridge University.

Their magazines are of the highest quality…and their appeals make subtle hints as to my generous disposition. But where will it all end? Where Friends Reunited lead others must surely follow. Within a few years Deansfield Junior Mixed School, the Universities of Stockholm, Uppsala, Lund and East Africa, Wheelock College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Stone Institute of Management and the System Dynamics Group will be in on it.

Already Cambridge has joined Oxford in providing a high-class Blue Stocking Dating Agency…should I wish to avail myself of their services. They then lowered the tone by advertising in Private Eye but no doubt we will be screened against the university records before each Introduction to counter Dating Fraud.

As Blues Match coalesced with Auction Record in the deeper recesses of my brain I reflected on the curious nature of Celebrity. Of the 200 young men in my college year…the college went coeducational after my time…I could recollect the names of just 10%…and half of these were no more than names.

In my College Celebrity B-list, Norman Wilson, Mick Brewer and Ron Sandford were reading Mechanical Sciences; John Kingsley and Tim Davison doing Natural Sciences, Geoff Hallett studying History; and Frank Dobson and Dave Anderson…two soccer-playing and Newcastle Brown-swigging Geordies…signed up for a Jeffrey Archer-style Graduate Education Programme. There is no record of them in Google…yet these were the Best and the Brightest…the elite 0.8% of the Baby Boomer Years.

Churchill College is unique among Cambridge colleges. Its statutes require that it discriminate positively towards Science and Engineering and negatively against Private Schools. It is therefore statistically significant that of the eleven on my College Celebrity A-list five were not reading Natural or Mechanical Sciences Tripos.

Johnny Watson read Classics, Malcolm Phillips and Christopher Frayling read History, Colin Gleadell read English and Nick Jaff struggled over Alfred Marshall’s Magnus Opus. Completing the list is a Chemist…Nigel McCarthy who spent several years putting lead into petrol…and three Engineering Colleagues...Christopher Singleton who works for computer firms and lives in Wokingham, Peter Charles Mechlin Thompson who joined the Civil Service and Robin Garnett who did Geology and then sold himself to the Oil Business for the duration of his working life.

Also on my A-list are Geoff du Bois and Her from Leeds. Geoff was another Geordie and a Research Scientist who entered college a year after me in 1966 but became part of the Watson-Shepherd-Phillips Social Set. The name of my only Undergraduate Girlfriend escapes me. We met when Girton College played Churchill at Table Tennis. She was reading Natural Sciences and we hitch-hiked to Leeds one weekend for a party my brother was throwing at Leeds University. I let her go badly when my wife-to-be came to town. If Blues Match could find her…well then…