4 March 2026

An invitation to eat curry with 35 law professors. Is this a joke?

The prof said this could provide material

I’m afraid I left you all hanging last week: I didn’t give any details about my rent arrears. What a shame, you might be saying to yourselves – we’ve barely been able to control ourselves for excitement. It’s like watching Doctor Who as a kid, being left on a cliffhanger with our hero in great peril. Well, as it happens, at this end, it very much is like watching Doctor Who as a kid, living in terror of alien forces beyond one’s control. If I had a sofa, I’d be hiding behind it.

It turns out that my landlords put my rent up in October by slightly under 10 per cent; not in itself that unreasonable, as this is the first rise in five years. I have heard horror stories. But now I have to find £400 extra in a hurry and that’s not great. I also opened a letter recently from a debt collection agency informing me of a £500 debt incurred over a fuel bill dating from 2020. This is news to me and it looks worryingly legit, but I thought I’d paid that at the time. Maybe not. Admin is not my strong suit. Looking again at this terrifying letter I notice a logo in the bottom left-hand corner: a laurel wreath, as if for a prize, or a Caesar, or a bottle of good wine, but instead of any details as to what the award was for it just says, and says nothing else, in capital letters, “INVESTORS IN PEOPLE”. Well, I suppose in a sense a debt collection company does invest in people – only the fruits of the investment do not actually flow in the direction I would like. Then there is the small matter of the £1,700 I still owe my brother. All this makes the £40 I have yet to claim off Wetherspoon’s look pretty small – ha ha – beer. But every little helps.

“Change and decay in all around I see,” I sang to myself as I counted the coins on my bedside table. This actually came to about £10, which is quite handy when you have, as I did at my lowest ebb a couple of days ago, £1.12 in funds until payday. I also found the two halves of a tenner which had torn themselves apart, like Ian Curtis’s love, in my pocket. Fixing that involves actually going to a branch of NatWest, for some reason. There is still a physical space where the bank operates in Brighton’s Churchill Square shopping centre, but one gets the feeling that it is as endangered as an ocelot. What would happen if that shut?

Among the coins, I found a 1p dating from 1971. I was eight years old then. At that age I would sometimes take out the big tin of baby formula that had become the storage space for all the pre-decimal coins that had gone out of use. I marvelled at the huge bronze pennies and their ancience (a word I have just invented myself, and why not? cf patient/patience). Let me see: 1971 was 55 years ago, 55 years before that was 1916, and eight-year-old me would have been seriously impressed by a coin that old.

Where was I? Ah yes, being skint. Luckily, I got paid before things slipped me into serious trouble, thanks to this magazine, which maintains an excellent record when it comes to paying me on time. I’ve managed to get extra work, too, but all that seems to be doing is increasing the flow into the leaky bucket by an extra few drops.

So it was with keen interest that I saw an email forwarded to me by the NS: an invitation from a Professor P— T— inviting me to a curry in Brighton. He is a fan of mine. The only snag is that 35 senior law professors will also be going. I am doing a little thought experiment and I can’t say it isn’t filling me with a kind of panic. A couple of weeks ago I bailed out of a small social event because one of the three other people I find a bit boring. (I was also ill and the weather was lousy, but this person’s presence was definitely a factor.)

Professor P— also made me raise an eyebrow when he said: “Your column regularly identifies you as a poor cook readily available for a free, decent meal along with open-ended alcohol.” The last part of that sentence isn’t a million parsecs from the truth, but “poor cook”? Unless he means “a cook who is poor”, I beg to differ. Had he said it in a court of law I would have stood up and said: “Objection.” I am not a poor cook. I am a bloody good cook. Will Self once went so far, in this very magazine no less, to claim that my leftovers were better than most people’s freshly cooked meals. I once cooked a whole meal for a family of Romans, in Rome, and ten years later they still talk about it, and in a good way: the time il inglese defied stereotype and produced something that three generations of Italians found acceptable. They even applauded at the end.

Where Professor P— got the idea I can’t cook is beyond me. I know he’s reading these words because he says he does every week. Still, a free curry is a free curry, and it’s been a while since I had one. (Brighton is more of a Chinese town when it comes to non-British cuisine.) But 35 law professors? Thirty-five senior law professors? That’s 35 more senior law professors than I’m used to dealing with at one go. But the prof says this could provide material. Which I am afraid clinches the matter.

[Further reading: When Trotsky took on Keir Starmer]