William Poole discovers a university institution high in the French Alps

I’ve just been down to St Cross Church to pick something up. No one was answering the door at first, so I wandered around the graveyard of this decommissioned church. It is beautiful. I hadn’t realised just how many local worthies are buried there: the numismatist Heberden, he of the Ashmolean’s Coin Room; Bowra, that outrageous warden of Wadham; the dreadful Walter Pater; the football-headed Anglican composer Stainer; even the American sci-fi writer James Blish. I was visiting the church because it is now Balliol’s special collections centre (an inspired transformation).

I look forward to the day when all our churches have evolved into museums and libraries.

I was picking up from the archivist the Chalet Book, the hand-written register of the Alpine reading parties that go every summer from Oxford to the Chalet des Anglais, a wooden, electricity-free chalet high in the Alps opposite Mont Blanc.

It’s been going in various forms since the 19th century, was burnt down by a careless student in 1906, rebuilt and reopened in 1909, and it’s been used ever since then by Oxford students. It’s currently shared by three colleges, and we each take out two parties of about 16 students every summer.

In a few days I am off to open the place up, re-plumb in the water from the stream (we use tights stretched over a funnel as a filter), fit gas cylinders to the fridges and ovens, and generally sort out a building that will have been comprehensively attacked by the local fauna since we closed it late last summer. There will be dead mice in the water jugs. I’ll arrive with the chalet book under my arm, the latest volume in our registers going back now for well over a century, and a fascinating record of how things have changed over the years — in student fashions in particular.

There, in photos, we can see the disaster that was the eighties, the slightly risqué homosociality of the inter-war years, the young men in their sporting suits in the 1910s, many of them to die in the coming war.

There is the welcome arrival of women, and the mixed blessing of colour photography.

We also have a library at the chalet, a kind of book-cairn, to which each year’s chaletites add their discarded reading.

The chalet is a unique institution — it’s open to all students, places are snapped up, and it functions as a social mixing-pot. We all walk, cook, read, drink, and talk together; a mix of undergraduates, graduates, and the odd fellow. The chalet is lit by gas lamp and candle, and one day I will accidentally burn everyone to death, but it shall be a noble way to go. At times it’s a pretty eccentric place too.

I turned up a few years back to find myself in the middle of a progressive dinner. Everyone was sporting war-paint; a research fellow was wearing a tuxedo, and she had lent her dress to a strapping youth. Even I slightly boggled at the sight.

I wonder what this year has in store.