There’s a notice in the entrance to one of Magdalen’s quads that warns in eight languages: ‘PRIVATE: NO ADMITTANCE’. On busy days it has roughly the same effect on tourists that catnip has on cats.


The trespassers aren’t hard to spot. However nonchalantly they stroll around, their eyes and fingers are always busy, pointing out gargoyles or poking around in the shrubbery. They take nothing for granted.


Sometimes they manage to track down where we eat lunch, and peer through the window at us, as if our dining room was really a huge aquarium.


They always look disappointed at what they discover. There are no bow ties or flapping gowns. Nobody is puffing on a pipe. Only occasionally is there a murderous glint in someone’s eye as they size up a colleague over the apple crumble.


If that sort of curiosity is hard to deal with over lunch, it’s harder still for the dons who live permanently inside college walls. As soon as they leave their rooms they are more than merely visible. They are on show.


During daylight hours they cannot go anywhere without becoming unwitting extras in someone else’s home movie.


Living in college is far less common than it used to be. Of my 80-odd colleagues, only a dozen view Magdalen as their home.


None has the right to stay on after retirement. When Clive James was a graduate student at Cambridge in the 1960s, he noticed an old man shuffling around King’s College in his carpet slippers who looked like E.M. Forster. It was E.M. Forster. It’s hard to imagine that sort of encounter happening today.


Still, for those who do choose to live in college, there are perks.


They don’t have to cook or clean (unless they want to). They can live quietly while surrounded by a steady hum of activity. They can nip out to the shops and then retreat to a little green oasis.


In 2002, I lived in college rooms for a year, and I loved every minute. I could play at being a hermit or, if I wanted some fun and games, I could walk a hundred yards and get the bus to London.
Every morning I woke to the sounds of bells ringing and deer coughing in the mist.


So why did I move out?
There were some obvious reasons, like the fact that student revelry becomes much less fun when it wakes you up at 3am.
But there was also a more unexpected motivation.


I’d started taking my surroundings for granted. My eyes were sliding off the beautiful buildings as if they were coated in Teflon.


So I left. I bought a house and started commuting. And the result is that now I can look at the college with fresh eyes.


Every morning, as I wheel my bicycle through the gate, I am newly surprised by a place where history seems to be holding its breath.


Every time I walk past the ‘PRIVATE’ sign, it reminds me not to take Oxford for granted.