I’ve come back almost every year since – to write, to think, merely to exist. It is still ‘that sweet city with her dreaming spires’, as Matthew Arnold wrote in 1865 of this waterway-streaked, cobble-alley town. I’ve always had a soft spot for the old drinking route, from the days when Oxford’s flair for hospitality hadn’t quite caught up with its flair for academia. You’d have a stiffener at The Randolph, the tired but atmospheric grande dame, before the church bells on St Giles’ tolled six. Then, everyone would head for The Eagle and Child pub, to sit at the tables where the Inklings would meet to compare manuscripts and initials (CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien would read aloud; the great Shakespeare scholar HVD Dyson once stormed out of a meeting muttering, ‘Oh God, not another fucking elf!’)
Oxford has, of course, changed with the times. More than Cambridge, there is a ‘real’ city beyond the colleges; beyond the light in the spire of Exeter College Chapel, which was perhaps an inspiration for Tolkien’s Eye of Sauron, and still guides tipsy students back down Broad Street from The King’s Arms pub. There is a youthful buzz to the place these days; a sense of reinvention and possibility. The Randolph has had a jazzy, millennial-friendly makeover; The Punter has gone from serving Sunday roasts to clever vegetarian dishes; there are plans for smart new rooms above the creaking timber beams of The Eagle and Child.
