On the other hand, I know that for every one time I've felt inside any kind of elite, there have been a thousand times when I've felt outside of one, and my life has been about building structures in which everyone is valued for the unique contribution they can bring to the whole - if someone says something which makes sense, you act on it because it makes sense, not because someone else some other time thought they said something which made sense in another context. It's self-evident for me that I get more insights into the secrets of the universe and what life is all about from the 5-year-old, and the 8-year-old and the 11-year-old that I spend time with than I ever did from reading an academic treatise.

And, honestly, at the deeper level the whole thing felt absurd -

• there were 112 doctoral graduates and for each of them the same routine, the dean of their faculty says "Greetings - receive the crown of laurels - receive the ring - receive the diploma - farewell" and everyone claps enthusiastically: it took three hours
• they were all the time talking about maintaining traditions and doing things for historical reasons, but the whole university is only 40 years old, so it must be someone else's history and traditions they're maintaining ...
• the acoustic was awful in this new purpose-built university aula: the student choir was singing up on the top shelf at the back, it had about as much oomph as a cheap transistor radio ...
• although there was much talk about universality and the concept of being wedded to an open, objective love of science, the main theme of decoration, both on the walls and in people's dress, was the Swedish flag, as if there were something specifically Swedish about knowledge
• all the men were in tails, the women in showy silky dresses, the undergraduate marshals wearing these odd white caps with black peaks that to me make them look like railway station-masters, bad enough on the kind of smug fascistic male figure that one otherwise associates with elitist Uppsala or Lund (Sweden's Oxbridge), even more absurd atop a shapely female figure in a gorgeous silken evening dress worn with long silky gloves, as she stands in a stiff state of tension on the corner of the stage as a support for the Swedish flag

• it's rather hard work messing around with the harpsichord in and out of new places and getting them unlocked and fitting in with other people's times and making a short isolated charismatic contribution to someone else's absolutely-non-charismatic programme (three hours without a leg-stretcher or any chorus songs or anything for the audience to do except clap - and they're doling out prizes for pedagogical excellence ...)

It was also completely exhausting, of course, I went for a short rest at 8.30 pm and didn't wake till now, 2.30 am ...