• Oxford United’s achievements in winning promotion back to the Football League earlier this year brought the club national coverage.

However, the club’s status as the county’s top team has passed by researchers for Thomas Cook’s pocket travel guides.

In the firm’s latest guidebook for Oxford, two pages are devoted to telling holidaymakers what sporting activities they can enjoy.

Tourists are informed they can go bowling at the Bowlplex, in Grenoble Road (just next door to United’s home at the Kassam Stadium) visit the ice rink or even hire a punt from the Cherwell Boathouse.

They are also told there are “plenty of spectator sports on offer in the city”, including watching “the city’s premier rugby team” Oxford Harlequins.

In the prologue, the guide’s writers boast they have unlocked the secrets of world travel destinations for 135 years.

United have been around for 117 of those years, first as Headington United, then from 1960 as Oxford United, but still seem to escaped the notice of the guide’s compilers.

Club spokesman Chris Williams said: “We’re averaging about 7,000 people a game and that’s the biggest regular sporting crowd in Oxfordshire, so clearly people do know where to go for sport in Oxford.

“We'll be happy to show Thomas Cook around if they want to come and see the excitement in Oxford on a match day.

“Hopefully, they’ll include us in the guide next year.”

  • Sausages and ballroom dancing aren’t obvious bedfellows, but if ever there was a man to pull off such a marriage it’s Craig Revel Horwood.

The Strictly Come Dancing judge was on hand this week to crown Bampton butcher Patrick Strainge sausage champion of the South of England.

Minor celebrities often fill their spare time handing out obscure awards, but it seems Mr Revel Horwood is a genuine banger aficionado.

“I love any sausage that’s over 70 per cent pork, darling,” he told our reporter, “and I always try to get Farm Assured meat; always look out for the red tractor logo.”

It’s clearly that kind of attention to detail that got him through Celebrity Masterchef in 2007 and the sustenance from sausages that enables him to watch endless Z-listers totter around the dancefloor on a Saturday night.

  • The Insider’s web browser alighted on an interesting piece of social history this week. The excellent BBC blog written by documentary-maker Adam Curtis has unearthed a film from 1977, which followed a Cowley car factory worker on a trip to the Lada car factory in what was then the Soviet Union.

The chosen British Leyland worker was staunch trade unionist Bill Jupp, who remains a well-known figure in Oxford as a champion of pensioners’ rights and as secretary of the Unite union’s Retired Members’ Association.

Highlights of the programme include Mr Jupp indulging in some off-the-wall Russian health treatments, the revelation that Lada drivers took their windscreen wipers off in car parks to stop them being stolen and an encounter with some tough-talking, chain-smoking Russian union bosses.

Segments from the documentary can be viewed online at bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/