The fabulous view on the right is what greeted me on Monday morning as I threw wide the curtains after a blissful night of slumber and began to brace myself for another week of work. All Souls and its chapel look mightily impressive from the fourth floor of the Old Bank Hotel. Minutes later, I was amused to find these noble buildings relocated to “the banks of the Cherwell” in an article about Henry Kissinger – who had ambitions to study at the college, apparently – that I read on the loo.

This was in the Culture section of The Sunday Times, a newspaper I had found no time to read amid the punishing schedule of the previous day. How had I spent it? Rather as an Oxford tourist might, albeit a very cosseted tourist. At the invitation of the Old Bank’s owner, Jeremy Mogford, Rosemarie and I enjoyed a mini-holiday there to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its opening (an event covered at the time in this column, as indeed had been – exclusively – his earlier acquisition against much competition of a long lease on the handsome former Barclays bank).

Our programme also included a short walk around the city centre with the hotel’s tourist guide and art expert Isabella Underhill, an inspection with her (over glasses of champagne) of some of the excellent pictures at Jeremy’s other Oxford hotel, the 30-bedroom Old Parsonage, and a super lunch from the new autumn menu (lamb sweetbreads, halibut and English cheeses in my case) farther up the Banbury Road at his delightful conservatory restaurant Gee’s.

To try to see our city as others see it struck me as a useful exercise during the 24 hours I spent as an Old Bank guest – my first experience of staying in an Oxford hotel, I think, since a one-night sojourn at The Black Horse in St Clements (then unlicensed), in the spring of 1973 when I came to be interviewed for my job on The Oxford Times.

One impression most visitors must receive is of a city under constant repair. Besides the ongoing work on the bus-clogged High Street (does it really need to take so long?), my vantage point in the hotel’s room 45 also presented a view of the University Church and the Radcliffe Camera both encased in scaffolding.

There remain, of course, many scenes of incomparable beauty, as we agreed during our walk with Isabella. Meeting her on Sunday morning had been an unexpected pleasure for me, incidentally, since her name, given to me in advance, had concealed the identity of someone whose company I had not enjoyed for more than 30 years. ‘Bella Forbes’, as she had been when I knew her well, is the younger sister of my old friend and colleague Grania Forbes (later a distinguished royal correspondent for the Press Association) who began work at Newspaper House on the very day that I did.

Isabella’s role as guide for guests at the Mogford hotels also includes supplying them with information about Jeremy’s very significant 20th-century art collection that is housed in them. While I had previously seen Duncan Grant’s 1945 portrait of Paul Roche, which is on display in the public area of the Old Parsonage, I had missed the superb collection of the whole of Wyndham Lewis’s Thirty Personalities and a Self-portrait drawings in the corridor leading to the Old Bank’s residents-only lounge. Almost all were completed in two months during 1932. They include notable studies of Father Martin D’Arcy SJ, later Master of Campion Hall, who assisted many converts, including Evelyn Waugh, towards the Roman Catholic faith, and (below right) the novelist Rebecca West, a work said to have prompted Walter Sickert’s remark that Lewis was “the greatest portraitist of this, or any other time”.

Before dinner on Sunday in the Old Bank’s Quod restaurant (I found room for Jersey crab and pollack), we took a stroll along cobbled Merton Street – where I marvelled that someone hadn’t taken dynamite to hideous No 19 which spoils a glorious view of Magdalen Tower. Then it was off to the tourist trap of the Turf Tavern, where a cheery young barman entertained us with tales of some of its notable visitors – including Stephen Hawking whose wheelchair got stuck in the loo – and where we met, as any visitor might hope to do, a genuine Oxford undergraduate.

He was a young man, Matt, whom we had encountered three weeks earlier on the Blue Star ferry Paros en route from Piraeus to Naxos. Small world, eh?