Our hero Seamus Perry provides a column despite being very ill

I have spent years reading Wordsworth and I warmly concur that he is the great poet of childhood. No one, not even Freud, has written better about the way your early experiences shape the grown-up that you become.

Nor has anyone articulated more wonderfully the transformation that offspring can have on your life.

“A child, more than all other gifts/That earth can offer to declining man,/Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts,” as he says in Michael.

One remarkable thing about children on which Wordsworth remained curiously silent, however, is their boundless capacity to make you ill.

Those precious early years of parenthood are characterised by doting wonder, to be sure, but also by a succession of streaming colds and coughs brought home by your treasure from nursery and school.

I can see it would have been difficult to do this detail full justice in the Intimations of Immortality Ode, but still, I think its absence represents a blindspot on Wordsworth’s part.

Memories of that phase of life inevitably return at this time of the academic year.

We are in the thick of Michaelmas now and everyone has a cold — the inevitable consequence of spending one’s professional life in the seething miasma of germs from around the world that we sometimes refer to euphemistically as ‘a research-led international university’.

I do not have a tube in my head that is not blocked, and as soon as I encounter cold air my eyes run with tears.

I arrive at meetings and tutorials looking like I’ve been weeping for hours.

Actually, if you’re teaching Tennyson, “the saddest of all English poets” as T.S. Eliot called him, this can have quite an impressive effect.

But when you’re attending a financial committee in the humanities division it is not always so advantageous for the head of English to arrive looking like a man on the edge of despair.

Especially as, in truth, our spirits are high.

An outfit called QS, evidently characterised by sagacity and good sense, has ranked Oxford the best place to study English in the world. Trebles all round!

League tables are, it goes without saying, vulgar and meretricious; but naturally it is more agreeable to adopt so principled a view while sitting at the top of them.

The other sign of deep Michaelmas is the final evanishment of the tourists.

My colleague Will Poole wrote very amusingly in Quad Talk a while back about the disadvantages of living in a tourist zone.

I am not sure which person in Brussels decided that 20 per cent of the pre-pubescent population of Mediterranean Europe should be translocated to Oxford every summer, but I agree with Will that this audacious plan has not worked and it’s time to reconsider.

Still, I nurse an affection for the normal tourists — like the northern couple I once overheard in Radcliffe Square.

“It’s grand, isn’t it?” said the lady. “Aye,” said her husband, reaching for a suitable comparison. “Just like Sheffield.”