EXCUSE us please, but can you help?” The request came from three teenage French girls wandering along the Broad Walk in front of Christ Church.

They were armed with a test sheet and were struggling to find an answer to the question of what were the names of the fantasy stories written by Lewis Carroll.

No problem, I said, and trotted out the titles of those wonderful books – Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass.

“What are they about?” asked the taller of the three. Here the problem began. The girls’ English was limited and my schoolboy French, although more advanced than asking where the pen of my aunt was to be found, was rusty.

Have you tried to explain in a foreign tongue the significance of a white rabbit (un lapin blanc) rushing about with une horloge (a clock – I couldn't remember the word for pocket watch) and disappearing down a hole to be followed by the said Alice?

Trying to describe the antics of ‘Le chat de Cheshire’ was too much, while those pack of cards characters were the stuff of nightmares. The girls must have thought they had encountered a madman.

Eventually, with Gallic grace, they thanked me and rejoined a larger group, casting backward sympathetic glances.

I walked on to where the towers of Magdalen and Merton could be seen standing proud in the morning sunlight.

Imagine the problems if the question had included the fantasy works of those colleges’ luminaries, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.

UNDER normal circumstances it would be ungallant to disbelieve a woman of 90, but to the lady in question, I offer no apologies.

“I'm going to retire in February,” said Peggy Barson, for 70 years the ever-smiling face in the New Theatre box office.

She was making her intentions known to another customer when I popped in. Her reason hinged on the decision of the powers-that-be to install a new computer. It would be too much for her, she claimed.

I guffawed. She has threatened retirement more times than Frank Sinatra made comebacks.

She would be bored to tears. In addition to her theatre duties she is constantly active, a keen gardener and a regular cook for much younger people, whom she finds are unwilling or unable to look after themselves.

“I mean it,” she emphasised.

Whom was she trying to convince – me or herself?

SPEND over £20 and get a free cap, read the notice in the High Street Oxford Blue shop. This offer was spotted by a female student, who tugged the arm of her male companion.

“But I don’t want a cap,” he said.

She persisted until he caved in and asked her to lend him the £20. Suddenly the offer lost its appeal.