William Poole knows exactly what he is talking about. We do not

Dreeing my weird along the Banbury Road I am just looking for things to annoy me. I’ve been spitting the kidney at yet more witless university signage, this time a board in Jericho that gushes ‘Inspired by Philanthropy’ (= so give us your cash).

The red-trousered heroes of North Oxford are out in force today, delighted by a Summertown market where you can buy stuff at four times the price it costs sensible people.

I work a few charity shops in private lamentation, and emerge exultant with an odd volume of the Court Historian journal.

Who would have thought that the 1603 English embassy to Denmark could be so fascinating, I tell myself firmly.

Heading south again I resist a further Jeremiad and instead turn on the internal fact-rotator.

I meditate the passing brickwork: soldier, sailor, stretcher, shiner, header, rowlock. Dutch Bond, English Bond.

I see a don I know cycling on the pavement towards me.

Jauntily, I pretend he is going to run me over; he pretends he is going to run me over; we pretend I am going to be run over; we pass one another unharmed, caressing murder.

My old doctoral supervisor John Carey once wrote a classic snarl of an essay on getting “down with the dons” at this end of town, including a description of some red-socked hypocrite, “leering at milk bottles” amidst his ghastly children.

You don’t get dons like that any more. These days they look plump but defeated, unwillingly pledged to ‘innovation and excellence’ or some other humiliating, cheapening slogan.

No: your bookish cove at this end of town usually has the head of a fat-cheeked girl atop the body of a publican — that odd, crumbling juvescence that renders so many (male) dons greying with fresh, blubbery faces, side-fat, and hands like meringues.

As for the females of our tribe, I note that many come to resemble pieces of cutlery: sharp knives carving up the blubbery meringues.

I always thought there was an element of Fight Club about the great Carey: he spent a great deal of time whacking something he too resembled. Not, of course, that this rendered the spanking any less virtuosic, and “leering at milk bottles” is immortal.

Inspecting my meringue-like hands and my prematurely distinguished locks, I see that I have not escaped Fight Club either.

This ghastly university signage is getting me down. Somewhere, someone with a shiny suit, squared cufflinks, and a masters in paperclips and resentment has explained his ‘vision’ for Everything Looking The Same.

North Oxford is filling up with tall, empty buildings guarded by these characterless blue rectangles.

The dons can’t afford to live here any more, and so the academic ghetto consists almost entirely of the retired, who are now probably reduced to inviting one another for dinner.

They are my favourite people in Oxford — they come from a nobler, more amiably offensive age.

I sigh my way home past the last, cruellest piece of university signage: ‘Centre for the Study of Population Ageing.’ No! I am not giving in to all this!

Soldier, sailor, stretcher, shiner, header, rowlock. Dutch bond. English bond. Soldier, sailor …