I had it in mind to do another little walk while the weather was fine, so I didn't linger. I bought a pasty in a baker's and ate it as I found my way to the Wye. I picked up a riverside path by the town's handsome stone bridge and followed it north along the Welsh bank. For the first forty minutes, I was accompanied by the ceaseless roar of traffic on the A40, but at a place called Goldsmith's Wood the river bent sharply away from the road and I was suddenly in another, infinitely more tranquil world. Birds fussed and twittered in the trees above and small, unseen creatures plinked into the water at my approach. The river, sparkling and languid and framed by hills of autumncoloured trees, was very beautiful and I had it all to myself. A mile or two further on, I paused to study the map and noticed a spot on a nearby hill called King Arthur's Cave. I couldn't pass that up, so I lumbered up the hill and poked around among likely spots. After about an hour of clambering over boulders and fallen trees, I found it, to my mild astonishment. It wasn't much just a shallow chamber hewn by nature from a limestone cliffface but I had a pleasing sense of being its first visitor in years. At any rate, there were none of the usual signs of visitation graffiti and abandoned beer cans which may make it unique in Britain, if not the world.

 Because time was getting on, I decided to take a shortcut through the hilly woods, but I neglected to note that I was at the uppermost of a very tight band of contour lines. In consequence, I found myself a moment later descending a more or less perpendicular hill in an entirely involuntary fashion, bounding through the woods with great leaps and outflung arms in a manner oddly reminiscent of George Chakiris in West Side Story, except of course that this was Wales and George Chakiris didn't shit himself with terror, before eventually, after several bouncing somersaults and an epochal eightyyard slide on my stomach, ending up on the very lip of a giddy precipice, with a goggleeyed view of the glittery Wye a hundred feet below. I cast my gaze back along my suddenly motionless body to find that my left foot had fortuitously snagged on a sapling. Had the sapling not been there I would not be here.

 Muttering, 'Thank you, Lord, I owe you one,' I hauled myself tomy feet, dusted twigs and leafmould from my front, and clambered laboriously back up the hill to the path I had so intemperately forsaken. By the time I reached the riverbank another hour had gone. It took another hour or so to hike on to Symonds Yat, a spacious wooded bluff at the top of a formidable hill, with long views in many directions. It was exceedingly fetching a hangglider's vista over the meandering river and an Arcadian landscape of fields and woodland stretching off to the distant Black Mountains.

 'Not bad,' I said, 'not bad at all,' and wondered if there was anywhere near by where I could get a cup of tea and possibly change my pants.

 CHAPTER TWELVE

 THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS THAT YOU HAVE TO BE BRITISH OR AT LEAST older than me, or possibly both, to appreciate: Sooty, Tony Hancock, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, Marmite, skiffle music, that Morecambe and Wise segment in which Angela Rippon shows off her legs by dancing, Gracie Fields singing 'Sally', George Formby doing anything, Dixon of Dock Green, HP sauce, salt cellars with a single large hole, travelling funfairs, making sandwiches from bread you've sliced yourself, really milky tea, allotments, the belief that household wiring is an interesting topic for conversation, steam trains, toast made under a gas grill, thinking that going to choose wallpaper with your mate constitutes a reasonably good day out, wine made out of something other than grapes, unheated bedrooms and bathrooms, seaside rock, erecting windbreaks on a beach (why, pray, are you there if you need a windbreak?) and taking an interest in byelections. There may be one or two others that don't occur to me at the moment.

 I'm not saying that these things are bad or boring or misguided, merely that their full value and appeal yet eludes me. Into this category, I would also tentatively insert Oxford.

 I have the greatest respect for the university and its 800 years of tireless intellectual toil, but I must confess that I'm not entirely clear what it's for, now that Britain no longer needs colonial administrators who can quip in Latin. I mean to say, you see all these dons and scholars striding past, absorbed in deep discussions about the LeibnizClarke controversy or postKantian aesthetics and you think: Most impressive, but perhaps a tad indulgent in a countrywhere there are 3 million unemployed and the last great invention was cat'seyes? Only the night before there had been an item on News at Ten in which Trevor McDonald had been radiant with joy to announce that the Samsung Corporation was building a new factory in Tyneside which would provide jobs for 800 people who were willing to wear orange boilersuits and do t'ai chi for a halfhour every morning. Now call me an unreconstructed philistine, but it seems to me and I offer this observation in a spirit of friendship that when a nation's industrial prowess has plunged so low that it is reliant on Korean firms for its future economic security, then perhaps it is time to readdress one's educational priorities and maybe give a little thought to what's going to put some food on the table in about 2010.

 I remember once years ago watching a special international edition of University Challenge between a team of British scholars and a team of American scholars. The Britishteam won so handily that they and Bamber Gascoigne and the studio audience were deeply, palpably embarrassed. It really was the most dazzling display of intellectual superiority. The final score was something like 12,000 to 2. But here's the thing. I am certain beyond the tiniest measure of doubt that if you tracked down the competitors to see what has become of them since, you would find that every one of the Americans is pulling down $350,000 a year trading bonds or running corporations while the British are studying the tonal qualities of sixteenthcentury choral music in Lower Silesia and wearing jumpers with holes in them.

 But don't worry. Oxford has been preeminent since the Middle Ages, and I am sure that it will remain so long after it has become the University of Oxford (Sony UK) Ltd. The university, it must be said, has become infinitely more commercialminded. At the time of my visit, it was just finishing a successful, fiveyear, .340million fundraising campaign, which was most impressive, and it had learned the value of corporate sponsorship. If you look through the prospectus you'll find it littered with references to things like The AllNew Shredded Wheat (No Added Sugar or Salt) Chair of Eastern Philosophy and the Harris Carpets WhyPayMore Thousands of Rolls in Stock at Everyday Low Prices School of Business Management.

 This business of corporate sponsorship is something that seems to have crept into British life generally in recent years without being much remarked upon. Nowadays you have the Canon League, the CocaCola Cup, the EverReady Derby, the Embassy World Snooker Championships. The day can't be far off when we get things like the Kellogg's Pop Tart Queen Mother, the Mitsubishi Corporation Proudly Presents Regents Park, and Samsung City (formerly Newcastle).

 But I digress. My gripe with Oxford has nothing to do with fundraising or how it educates its scholars. My gripe with Oxford is that so much of it is so ugly. Come with me down Merton Street and I will show you what I mean. Note, as we stroll past the backs of Christ Church, the studied calm of Corpus Christi, the soft golden glow of Merton, that we are immersed in an architectural treasure house, one of the densest assemblages of historic buildings in the world, and that Merton Street presents us with an unquestionably becoming prospect of gabled buildings, elaborate wroughtiron gates and