Perhaps we have made our Omegas what they are by our own folly; a regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development. If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils. I have one vivid memory of them which remains the living icon of how I see them, how they see themselves. It was last June, a hot but unsultry day of clear light with slow-moving clouds, like wisps of muslin, moving across a high, azure sky, the air sweet and cool to the cheek, a day with none of the humid languor I associate with an Oxford summer. I was visiting a fellow academic in Christ Church and had entered under Wolsey’s wide, four-centred arch to cross Tom Quad when I saw them, a group of four female and four male Omegas elegantly displaying themselves on the stone plinth. The women, with their crimped aureoles of bright hair, their high bound brows, the contrived folds and loops of their diaphanous dresses, looked as though they had stepped down from the Pre-Raphaelite windows in the cathedral. The four males stood behind them, legs firmly apart, arms folded, gazing not at them but over their heads, seeming to assert an arrogant suzerainty over the whole quad. As I passed, the females turned on me their blank, incurious gaze, which nevertheless signalled an unmistakable flicker of contempt. The males briefly scowled, then averted their eyes as if from an object unworthy of further notice and gazed again over the quad. I thought then, as I do now, how glad I was that I no longer had to teach them.