Mr Clark drinks only milk and a glass of wine every night with his dinner.Mr Clark does have friends in nearby towns and villages. When not visiting them he lies on his bed listening to classical music on his stereo.A spokesman for MPH Construction said: “He was told to leave by the former owner and should have been gone when we bought the land. We are not kicking him onto the street.” Mr Clark had been allowed to stay for a couple of months “to sort himself out”, said the spokesman, but time had run out.Despite his reticence, the hermit may soon be seen by millions after filming a cameo role in a new movie written by the comedians Steve Coogan and Henry Normal. His co-stars are rumoured to include Omar Sharif and Jenny Agutter. Mr Clark was “discovered” riding through the streets of Shaw on his bike last year.”I got into a big row with a driver who’d cut me up and it turned out that he was a producer,” he explains.

“He was so impressed with me that he asked him to star as ‘Crusty’, the head of a bike gang in his movie. I really enjoyed it, but there’s no way you could tempt me to Hollywood – too many people and not enough privacy.”. This evening in Oxford, a hundred of the brightest and best academic brains in the country will come together to chase a duck The duck is a mallard. The pursuers are current and former fellows of All Souls College – the Oxford college which may be supposed to contain the greatest concentration of academic excellence in Christendom, or at least in Europe. This evening in Oxford, a hundred of the brightest and best academic brains in the country will come together to chase a duck The duck is a mallard. The pursuers are current and former fellows of All Souls College – the Oxford college which may be supposed to contain the greatest concentration of academic excellence in Christendom, or at least in Europe.
It is no undergraduate prank, because All Souls is famous for being the one Oxbridge college that has no undergraduates at all It is dons who will chase this mallard imaginaire.

The officiator, the Lord Mallard, will be carried before them in what amounts to a sedan-chair, shoulder-high. And through it all a mallard, a duck, the cause of it all, will be borne before them on a pole.Oxford has a long memory. It is exactly 100 years since the All Souls mallard was last chased. It means, of course, that no one at this mallard was alive at the last one. By the time it is over the ceremony will have been performed at the century’s turn precisely three times in history – in 1801, in 1901, and tonight.If Oxford is an ivory tower, All Souls is a whiter, brighter minaret at its peak.

A fellowship at All Souls represents the pinnacle of academic achievement. Its scions used to move effortlessly from academia to the corridors of power and back again, from public service and Whitehall to discreet conversations at High Tables.Sir Christopher Wren was a fellow, and designed the sundial in the quad – allegedly the most beautiful, and certainly the best-preserved medieval quadrangle in all of Oxford.Warden of all this inheritance is Dr John Davis, formerly professor of social anthropology, president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, founder of the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, and so on. His office, of course, is pannelled, elegant, with arm-chairs as well as books wall to wall. So is it the single greatest concentration of brain-power in Europe?”In the humanities, in Britain, possibly,” he says. “The equivalent establishment in France is organised somewhat differently.” He is, as one might expect, a stickler for accuracy.And what, in this modern world of Blairite politics, does All Souls do? The Neill committee sets the standards for public life; Lord Neill is a former All Souls man.