fine seventeenthand eighteenthcentury townhouses. Several of the houses have been mildly disfigured by the careless addition of electrical wires to their facades (something that other less intellectually distracted nations would put inside) but never mind. They are easily overlooked. But what is this inescapable intrusion at the bottom? Is it an electrical substation? A halfway house designed by the inmates? No, it is the Merton College Warden's Quarters, a little dash of mindless Sixties excrescence foisted on an otherwise largely flawless street.

 Now come with me while we backtrack to Kybald Street, a forgotten lane lost amid a warren of picturesque little byways between Merton Street and the High. At its eastern extremity Kybald Street ends in a pocketsized square that positively cries out for a small fountain and maybe some benches. But what we find instead is a messy jumble of doubleand tripleparked cars. Now on to Oriel Square: an even messier jumble of abandoned vehicles. Then on up Cornmarket (avert your gaze; this is truly hideous), past Broad Street and St Giles (still more automotive messiness) and finally let us stop, exhausted and dispirited, outside the unconscionable concrete eyesore that is the University Offices on the absurdly named Wellington Square. No, let's not. Let's pass back down Cornmarket, through the horrible, lowceilinged, illlit drabness of the Clarendon Shopping Centre, out on to Queen Street, past the equally unadorable Westgate Shopping Centre and central library with its heartless, staring windows and come to rest at the outsized pustule that is the head office of Oxfordshire County Council. We could go on through St Ebbes, past the brutalist compound of themagistrates' courts, along the bleak sweep of Oxpens Road, with its tyre and exhaust centres and pathetically underlandscaped ice rink and car parks, and out onto the busy squalor of Park End Street, but I think we can safely stop here at the County Council, and save our weary legs.

 Now none of this would bother me a great deal except that everyone, but everyone, you talk to in Oxford thinks that it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with all that that implies in terms of careful preservation and general liveability. Now I know that Oxford has moments of unutterable beauty. Christ Church Meadow, Radcliffe Square, the college quads, Catte Street and Turl Street, Queens Lane and much of the High Street, the botanic garden, Port Meadow, University Parks, Clarendon House, the whole of north Oxford all very fine. It has the best collection of bookshops in the world, some of the most splendid pubs and the most wonderful museums of any city of its size. It has a terrific indoor market. It has the Sheldonian Theatre. It has the Bodleian Library. It has a scattering of prospects that melt the heart.

 But there is also so much that is so wrong. How did it happen? This is a serious question. What sort of mad seizure was it that gripped the city's planners, architects and college authorities in the 1960s and 1970s? Did you know that it was once seriously proposed to tear down Jericho, a district of fine artisans' homes, and to run a bypass right across Christ Church Meadow? These ideas weren't just misguided, they were criminally insane. And yet on a lesser scale they were repeated over and over throughout the city. Just look at the Merton College Warden's Quarters which is not by any means the worst building in the city. What a remarkable series of improbabilities were necessary to its construction. First, some architect had to design it, had to wander through a city steeped in 800 years of architectural tradition, and with great care conceive of a structure that looked like a toaster with windows. Then a committee of finely educated minds at Merton had to show the most extraordinary indifference to their responsibilities to posterity and say to themselves, 'You know, we've been putting up handsome buildings since 1264; let's have an ugly one for a change.' Then the planning authorities had to say, 'Well, why not? Plenty worse in Basildon.' Then the whole of the city students, dons, shopkeepers, office workers, members of the Oxford Preservation Trust had to acquiesce and not kick up a fuss. Multiply this by, say, 200 or 300 or 400 and you have modern Oxford. And you tell me that it is one of the most beautiful, wellpreserved cities in. the world? I'm afraid not. It is a beautiful city that has been treated with gross indifference and lamentable incompetence for far too long, and every living person in Oxford should feel a little bit ashamed.

 Goodness me! What an outburst! Let's lighten up and go look at some good things. The Ashmolean, for instance. What a wonderful institution, the oldest public museum on Planet Earth and certainly one of the finest. How is it that it is always so empty? I spent a long morning there politely examining the antiquities, and had the place all to myself but for a party of schoolchildren who could occasionally be sighted racing between rooms pursued by a harriedlooking teacher, then strolled over to the PittRivers and University museums, which are also very agreeable in their quaint, welcometothe1870s sort of way. I trawled through Blackwell's and Dillon's, poked about at Balliol and Christ Church, ambled through University Parks and Christ Church Meadow, ranged out through Jericho and the stolid, handsome mansions of north Oxford.

 Perhaps I'm too hard on poor old Oxford. I mean, it is basically a wonderful place, with its smoky pubs and bookshops and scholarly air, as long as you fix your gaze on the good things and never go anywhere near Cornmarket or George Street. I particularly like it at night when the traffic dies away enough that you don't need an oxygen mask and the High Street fills up with those mysteriously popular doner kebab vans, which tempt me not (how can anyone eat something that looks so uncannily as if it has been carved from a dead man's leg?) but do have a kind of seductive Hopperish glow about them. I like the darkness of the back lanes that wander between high walls, where you half expect to be skewered and dismembered by Jack the Ripper or possibly a doner kebab wholesaler. I like wandering up St Giles to immerse myself in the busy conviviality of Brown's Restaurant a wonderful, friendly place where, perhaps uniquely in Britain, you can get an excellent Caesar salad and a bacon cheeseburger without having to sit among pounding music and a lot of ersatz Route 66 signs. Above all, I like to drink in the pubs, where you can sit with a book and not be looked on as a social miscreant, and be among laughing, lively young people and lose yourself in reveries of what it was like when you too had energy and a flat stomach and thought of sex as something more than a welcome chance for a liedown. I'd impetuously said I would stay for three nights when I booked into my hotel, and by midmorning of the third day I was beginning to feel a little restless, so I decided to have a walk to Sutton Courtenay for no reason other than that George Orwell is buried there and it seemed about the right distance. I walked out of the city by way of a water meadow to North Hinksey and onwards towards Boar's Hill through an area called, with curious indecisiveness, Chilswell Valley or Happy Valley. It had rained in the night and the heavy clay soil stuck to my boots and made the going arduous. Soon I had an accumulation of mud that doubled the size of my feet. A bit further on the path had been covered with loose chippings, presumably to make the going easier, but in fact the chippings stuck to my muddy boots so that it looked as if I were walking around with two very large currant buns on my feet. At the top of Boar's Hill I stopped to savour the viewit's the one that led Matthew Arnold to spout that overwrought nonsense about 'dreaming spires', and it has been cruelly despoiled by those marching electricity pylons which Oxfordshire has in greater abundance than any county I know and to scrape the mud from my boots with a stick.