‘Everybody welcome” it says on the sides of the buses. Welcome, I would say, to sit fuming on a double-decker that is going nowhere. Let me explain. Absurdly generous timetabling means that Brookes buses are obliged to make lengthy pauses during their journeys between the various University campuses. The service I caught the other night to St Clement’s stopped for a full ten minutes outside Lincoln Library in the High before proceeding on its way.

A friend who travels two or three times a week to Wheatley from Botley tells me this is par for the course. The routine involves a ten-minute stop in High Street and another of the same length at Gypsy Lane. Lots of time to listen to all that ghastly Heart radio pop being pumped out into the bus for the students. The other day a driver told my pal that he and his colleagues disliked the stops as much as the passengers, and preferred work on other routes where they could get on with the job.

I realise that Oxford’s traffic troubles make it difficult for the bus operators, but surely something could be done to address what is clearly a problem, if only a minor one.

As we continued on our way down the High on Monday, I noted that the metal sign column outside University College, which I wrote about here at least two months ago, is still collapsed to the pavement. Is no one ever going to put it right? One of the other three columns clustered nearby has also received a good whack. Perhaps the plan is to wait for them all to be knocked down.