I used to go to Summertown for my summer holidays, which made sense to a literal-minded Scot; my grandparents lived in Carlton Road. Up the way, The Trout was puzzlingly named, for it should surely be The Peacock, and the fish, thanks to the optics of water, too big and in the wrong place, were clearly chub: fat, indolent, Oxonian fish.

I had at that point only hunted mackerel off Skye, and knew that pounding to death that spectacularly stupid fish on the edge of a small rowing boat was refutation enough that fishing is a victimless crime.

I didn’t mind killing fish, but gutting them I left to my father. Your Oxonian chub, however, is an armchair kind of beast, muttering under its breath at passing tourists.

At the questionably-named Trout I instead coveted peacock feathers.

I fished for them by standing on the tails of the shrieking birds while looking innocently in the other direction. At eight, I already had in hand the basic tool of the academic.

The Trout was later to me a dark place with a hot fire and the welcome fug of fags and Directors bitter.

As an undergraduate I remember returning from Wolvercote to college in a taxi with a friend and my visiting parents, who, like most visiting parents, were trying to behave badly.

As we passed the graveyard my father remarked that he and my mother had experimented with their conjugal rights against a gravestone there some time in the late 1960s. Today that pub is your standard gastrosity with, no doubt, ‘hand-cut chips’ and ‘farm-assured chicken’.

All is not lost, old pub: I was peering at the waters in the dusk with the Harpist last year and an otter came out to play. I told the barman. He beamed and shouted ‘OTTERS!’, and everyone rushed outside.

The parliament of the dons is called ‘Congregation’, sparsely attended, for to be seen consorting with the academic politicians is, for the real dons, in very poor taste. These are the wonks and drones who babble about ‘visions’, ‘mission statements’ and ‘finding a way forwards’, as if they fished in the River Jordan rather than the Thames.

But now and then it’s important to peer up like the chub we are through the academic waters, so last year many of us swam up to vote in favour of a motion execrating the Government and its whopping tuition fees.

All the more chubbish, as we knew we were going to get our £9K per student a year even as we protested we didn’t really want it. Even old trout enjoy behaving like young swordfish.

The actual debate was going to be so dire that I took a book, a diary written by a don from Queen’s in the first half of the 17th century. He was called Thomas Crossfield, and I have long liked this forgotten fellow. He recalls a huge wassail one night from the gates of Univ up to Carfax, with dancing and music, an early form of a progressive morris.

He berates himself in his diary for speaking in English, and not Latin, to his pupils. Best of all, he took his students fishing. If I tried that in 2013 the wonks and drones would surely bash my brains out against the gunwales of their yacht of state, and they wouldn’t need my father to gut me.