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Peter Rhodes on standing for dons, dining on octopus and personalising your loaf

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For you, Mr Vis

BACK to Brexit tonight. It must be very hard for Theresa May, knowing that the best Brexit she can get will be the one that nobody really wants and everybody really hates.

YOU may be saddened, bewildered or infuriated by the weekend survey showing that one in 20 British adults haven't a clue about the Holocaust. But these are not active Holocaust-deniers; this survey is less about antisemitism than pure ignorance. And we do live in a remarkably ignorant country. If you stopped 100 average Brits in the street today, how many do you think could name the Foreign Secretary, identify two D-Day beaches or quote a single line from Shakespeare? One in 20? One in 100, perhaps? Faced with a similarly depressing survey some years ago, one academic told his TV interviewer frankly: "I wouldn't expect ordinary people to know much about anything."

HARRODS' latest marketing gimmick is to charge £4 a go to engrave the customer's name on a loaf of bread. I see that for a mere £10.99 online you can change your name by deed poll. In time, you could save a few quid by becoming Mr H O Vis.

ONE of the chief functions of Oxford University these days is to provide the media with wacky yarns. A couple of weeks ago it emerged that, in the name of accessibility for those of all backgrounds, octopus had been taken off the menu at Somerville College . The college head declared it was "not quite right for everyone". What the well-meaning middle class fail to grasp is that the average working-class kid knows octopus inside out. While wealthy children and their parents head for the Austrian ski slopes or to fiendishly expensive holiday homes in Cornwall, the working-class kids head south where, in beach bars from Ibiza to Cyprus, they devour calamari and octopus with gusto, and chips.

BY all means take octopus off the college menu, but do it for the sake of the poor, intelligent and sensitive octopus, not as some half-baked exercise in social sensitivity.

THE other great uni yarn is from St Catherine's, Oxford, where the tradition of students standing up at formal dinners when the Master enters has been abandoned. From now on, it will be left to the "personal decision of students." One youthful activist explains: "I find it very hard that we stand up, pay respects, and stand in silence for another human being to walk in (it is) wrong to have to pay such deference to another adult.” Good luck with the job hunting, laddie.

MY twin solution to the octopus and standing-up dilemmas is to introduce a live octopus as a guest on college dinner nights. I feel sure the students would rise as one to acknowledge his or her many qualities. Mind you, an electric eel would be more exciting.