It is tempting to hunker down now the clocks have gone back, drape yourself in the familiar, swaddle and hibernate, eating warm bland white foods until the snowdrops peep through, but sometimes it is worth opening the door to unexpected things. The great indoors has a lot going for it but I can’t stop thinking of that trick-or-treating toddler who stumbled up my front steps this Halloween, handed me a finger of fudge and said, “Cuddle?” He’s become a bit of a superhero in my mind — he was dressed as Spider-Man — where he represents the desirable unknown.

Open the door and good things can happen... The next day I took a train to Oxford to attend the memorial celebration of a professor I adored. He had such intelligence; he had such style. Are there academics of the first order, clever and kind, who still mend their suits with Copydex? Are there professors who stuff their gowns into an Oddbins carrier and slip £200 (Dh1,120) into a tutee’s pigeonhole when fear of the gas bill has dominated the Hardy tutorial? On the memorial panel there were eight men and one woman. You aren’t allowed to have a panel with eight men and one woman in London any more, I said to myself. Well, you know Oxford has always had it’s provincial side, I replied, tartly.

After the speeches I met an academic who was writing about fools. Fools in royal palaces, fools in Shakespeare. She told me Cardinal Wolsey had given his fool, William Sommers, to Henry VIII. There is much written about Sommers, who had not only entertained the king but also consoled him during tough times, advising Henry about unnecessary household extravagances and petitioning for justice when he saw things go awry at court. He must have had his work cut out. Perhaps most remarkably, in every sense, he had kept his head, going on to serve Henry’s daughter Mary.

None of Sommers’ jokes survived, apparently. There was a great deal of information but no gags. What would it have taken to make Henry VIII laugh? Who would have dared risk it? I googled Henry VIII’s sense of humour on my phone and what jumped back was “You don’t have to live like Henry VIII to suffer from gout”. Good to know. I think.

I wondered what it might be like to have a fool of one’s own. I pictured a Jiminy Cricket character, keeping me on the straight and narrow but also coming out with the odd, sparkling aside such as, “What does an actor want with a conscience anyway?”

Sometimes before going out in the evening I ask one of my babysitting nieces for fashion advice. I like to look high spirited but not “fun” or crazed. Perhaps the fool could help with this task too. Household extravagance? Well, there is an 18-piece dessert service from about 1820, white and gold with gold shells and grey roses on it that I can’t seem to forget. I gaze at it most nights online. It is in San Francisco. My worry is, even if it arrived intact tomorrow, would I be annoyed the roses weren’t pink? I just can’t tell. The fool might know.

Disliking criticism

Yet, a fool and I, it might not work out. It is a fool’s job to take you down a peg or two, and that is probably my least favourite thing, the ugliest of the English bloodsports.

Deep down and even superficially I don’t like criticism. Not ideal but not unusual, I suspect. I just don’t, sad to say, have a circle of yes-men and women who need to be diluted.

The conversation turned to King Lear’s fool. “He’s so melancholy,” I said. “The way he calls Lear ‘Nuncle’ makes them seem so close, somehow.”

My companion reminded me that when Edgar begins to act the beggar with Lear, the fool is upstaged, and just sort of disappears mysteriously at the end of Act 3. “And, of course,” I add, “he hangs himself at the end.”

“Do you think that because Lear says, ‘And my poor fool is hanged’?” she asks.

“Well, yes,” I say.

“Some people do think that it is the fool that Lear is referring to but I don’t think that. I’ve never read it that way,” she says.

“You don’t think the fool hangs himself at the end of King Lear?”

So she, an internationally acclaimed Shakespearean and expert on fools to boot, does not think he hangs himself.

It struck me as one of the best things I had ever heard. Even if it concerned events from more than 400 years ago, it’s never too late for good news.

I was so happy suddenly I could have . . . well, I know not what.

— Financial Times