When P. G. Wodehouse wrote: "It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core they are all alike. Sooner or later out pops the cloven hoof." he might as well have been describing poor Francis Flushington's dilemma.

He has just answered the door of his college rooms to an incoming aunt and a gaggle of female cousins, recently arrived from Australia and martialling all their forces to eat him out of house and home, frogmarch him around Cambridge as their tour guide, and embarrass him before all his fellow students.