Chats about the other British taboo — money — may have been equally faltering. Families will already have answered the essential question of how university costs will be met, provisionally at least. Many freshers will remain as unfamiliar with day-to-day money management as they are with set texts they were supposed to read over the summer.
Financial illiteracy is among the many defects us older people reflexively discern in the young. Under-18s scored an average of 2.3 correct answers out of 10 in a UK quiz run by the Centre for Economics and Business Research and financial website Wealthify. Mean scores rose steadily with age.