Please tell me it is a coincidence that, as I am flying last week to Lincoln to do some external examining at Lincoln University, the government chooses that very moment to allow the quality assurance agency for higher education to announce that young people are getting their degrees too easily.

Anyone who has a young person undertaking degree level study will know that this argument is not sustainable, or to put it another way it is complete and absolute rubbish. Certainly it has changed but that is a different argument. And change does not mean, as most conservatives assume, become easier. In fact the change is so profound in the way young people operate and the thinking environments they inhabit that I doubt anyone of my age will ever fully understand it again. They think differently, speak differently, use technology differently, link things together in a way that my generation would never even have considered and they understand that being educated does not mean not having an awareness of how to use that education to get a job. So let's put this standards nonsense to bed once and for all. Young people simply now inhabit a new ecology.

Thankfully that news was not the most interesting part of the visit to Lincoln. When one inhabits hotels as a sad, lonely individual one takes comfort from whatever there is to entertain in the hotel. This usually means watching television and reading every inane magazine supplied to tempt tourists. This also includes those advertising screens that are dotted all around hotel foyers.

This particular advertising screen came up with a message which I had to discuss with the receptionist to make sure I had read it right. It was an ad for a magician, which after naming him in bright lights proclaimed that he was available for weddings, parties and I really am not making this up – funerals.

Now parties and magicians I can understand but I am not sure what a magician would do at a wedding let alone a funeral. Discussing it with those who work in Lincoln (and had never heard of said magician I might add) brought only the predictable notions of making mothers-in-law disappear, cutting brides in half or making everyone think they had consumed a large feast when in fact none had been served. I would have been more of the making the bride forget that a wedding had taken place with a suitable signal, say the click of a finger, but I suppose that was fairly predictable also.

But I have been thinking long and hard about this magic funeral business and I am finding it extremely difficult to come up with anything. I suppose you could magic away the tears or create a bit of levitation so that no one had to carry the box and the poor unfortunate in it. Or like the wedding you could make everyone believe a wake had taken place even if it hadn't.

The notion is even more problematic when you think of it in the English context where the idea of having the funeral at home seems to have gone out of fashion entirely. At least if you have a wake at home you know you are going to get a crowd and there might be some kind of platform for a magic performance. But if the business is all being done through a funeral parlour and those paying respects turn up as and when they feel like it and leave as quickly as possible one wonders how the magician makes his money. Does he stand in the wings and wait until a suitable number are gathered or do his entertaining in the car park as people arrive and leave?

Interestingly on the entertainment front when I came home I was told by a relative that he had recently attended a funeral where a piper led the cortege through the streets to the cemetery. When he enquired about the piper from one of the dead person's family he discovered that they had not ordered a piper at all and the musician had come to the wrong funeral but no one had the heart to tell him so they just let him get on with it. That is the kind of politeness and care that goes out the window when the funeral parlour takes over!

So a strange week all in all. The only thing I can say for sure is that as the students I mentioned earlier go up next week to receive their degrees at graduation both they and their parents can be sure that if they are coming out with a good degree there was no magic formula in operation just hard honest graft despite what aging fools living in an idealised past want to think.