I applaud the wags — presumably undergraduates departing at the end of term — who added to our seasonal jollity by clambering up the railings outside the Sheldonian Theatre and equippping all the ‘emperors’ ranged along them with eye-catching headgear.

The adornment brought a smile to my face as I cycled down the Broad on Sunday morning. Like many others, I whipped out my mobile phone for some photographs.

A popular focus for visitors’ cameras, even without their decoration, the heads in their present form are the work of sculptor Michael Black, completed in the early 1970s.

These were the third set of ‘herms’ (to use the proper word) along the Broad Street frontage. The first lasted roughly two centuries, the second half as long. Undergraduates daubed them in paint early in their life and the harsh cleaning that followed led them to wear badly. By 1925 they were “the mouldering busts around the Sheldonian” to the student John Betjeman.