These days, I regret to say, my ‘visitations’* to pubs are much fewer than they were, though I remain part of their ‘audience’** at least once or twice a week. I think it quite clear that I am failing to heed my oft-given advice over one’s local that one must ‘use it or lose it’.

There is certainly encouragement to sample some of the best in the county in books recently penned by two of my writing colleagues on The Oxford Times. Food writer Helen Peacocke has produced a smashing guide for drinkers with four-footers in her Paws Under the Table. In it – as was explained in a feature in Weekend last month – she and her border collie Pythius-Peacocke researched 40 of the best dog-friendly pubs in the area. They include some of my own favourite places, among them The Plough Inn at Finstock, where the book was launched at a party last night, The Lamb Inn at Burford, The Perch at Binsey and The Fleece at Witney. You can buy the book, which comes from the Wychwood Press at £9.99, in “most good bookshops” (as they say) and, I suppose, at some bad ones too.

Meanwhile, as if to prove that interest in jazz and beer appear to go hand in hand, our jazz writer Paul Medley has teamed up with John Dougill on Pubs of Oxford and Oxfordshire, which Helen writes about today on Page 13. Though it is designed principally for visitors to the city and surrounding area, the book nevertheless contains valuable information for local people too. Even an old clever-clogs such as I, who has spent more than 30 years writing about our hostelries, can still come up against information that surprises.

An instance of this concerns The Chequers off the High Street where I discovered there had once been a display of animals. The authors write: “By 1762, the place was a veritable zoo, with a sea lion, a large fish (possibly a shark), a camel and a raccoon. It is not documented how long any of these survived in the dark and smoky environment, but the last known exhibit was a giant from Herefordshire.”

In sending me a complimentary copy of the book, Paul expressed the hope that I might write about it, though not – how well he knows me! – “to berate me for some inaccuracy.” As if I would! Since I gave absolutely no promise on the matter, however, I can’t resist, if not exactly berating an inaccuracy, at any rate asking a couple of questions concerning the facts as stated in the book. These concern the city centre’s largest and smallest pubs.

In the section on the King’s Arms, in Holywell, the authors state that this is the biggest. Can this really be true? In the days when I used to use it, the aforementioned Chequers, (pictured right) with all its space upstairs as well as down, used to seem much, much bigger. Ditto The Head of the River (pictured above), plans for the creation of which I remember hearing from the lips of Hall’s boss Anthony McMurtrie at the company’s now long-gone offices in Park End Street in 1973.

And as for the smallest, the book asserts that this is The White Horse in Broad Street, once known variously (another discovery for me) as The White Mermaid, The Jolly Volunteer and The Elephant.

I don’t want to pick a fight on the matter, but I thought it was well-known that The Bear in Alfred Street was the tiddliest. It certainly feels it when you are squashed in there next to a crew of six-foot Oriel oarsmen.

* I decided today to begin with some of he get-up-and-go language as offered on Tuesday’s Today programme on Radio 4 by Dr Michael Dixon, the boss of London’s Natural History Musuem. By ‘visitations’ he did not mean ghostly appearances or inspections but merely visits (the latest dictionaries say this is OK). As for ** ‘audience’, this was what the rest of us might call visitors.

The language employed by cultural administrators is, indeed, a strange one.