V odd supervision!

I'm going to have to blog this in the vaguest of terms, because I don't want anyone to google this and recognise who I am writing about. I had a supervision yesterday at one of the old, old colleges. The supervisor is the world expert in his field and very much the epitome of the Oxbridge Don. He took me for lunch at high table (with a cavalier disregard for the college's rules which state that undergraduates are not permitted at high table) and then we went to his office for a supervision. He thought I was studying history, not English. Then he thought I was a PhD student, not an undergraduate. Then he started a sentence with the words "If I were your supervisor, which I'm not - am I? - I'd recommend...".

I came home very confused. Did he just give me a supervision or didn't he? Has he forgotten that he had agreed to supervise me? Did he think he was just doing me a favour and recommending some reading? What do I do now? If I ask for my second supervision (I'm entitled to four) is he going to think I'm being a nuisance when he's already seen me once and told me what to read? I don't know where to go from here!

As an example of how eccentric he is, he was telling me that a woman had written to him on his specialist subject and had asked for recommended reading. He immediately fired an e-mail back telling her what to read. Once the e-mail had gone, he looked at her name again ... and realised he had recommended two of her own books to her!

Sometimes Cambridge is just so ... Cambridge!