Don’t jump to conclusions. There was no plan hatched or protest being made between these two further-education lecturers, and the whole business of their premature departure was expedited according to all the well-trodden procedural pathways, with medical certificates and second opinions and so on. But at the end of it all they got was their “enhancement” (the lecturer’s equivalent of the Holy Grail) and formally left the college.

Now they await the lump sum and the pension, to be calculated on the basis of “reckonable service”, which by anyone’s reckoning will add up to a good few years each. Mick stayed put in one college, while Phil moved around more, spending his last few years totally wound up.

Mick and Phil, their diminished appetites and aptitudes aside, were staffroom characters and are already being sorely missed. They’re part of a whole army of staff who are “well out of it” - people who had and probably still have a lot to offer but cannot be accommodated in the customer-oriented, managerially driven culture of the 90s.

Mick and Phil were both uptight by the time it came for them to have their final interviews with the vice-principal, and a few of us were worried that there might be a scene. But it all went quite well and they even had a cup of tea “on the company”. And with the dregs still warm, about 50 years of service walked out the door for the last time.

Since then, Mick, Phil and I have had many long conversations about what they will miss about college life - some staff, some students and the annual allocation of three black Biros. And now, earlier than they might have expected, they are having to face the vexed question of what to do with the rest of their lives after handing in their college car-park stickers.

Paul Winters teaches in a college offurther education in West Sussex