tombee was indeed a year below me (and was the person I allude to in the first paragraph :-)

Cambridge, of course, is well known for taking in enormous numbers of people who have never had the experience of finding they're not the smartest kid around any more, and giving nearly all of them that experience. (Though of course there's still got to be some smug bastard at the top of the heap, and there's probably nothing to be done about them...)