It took barely a minute, but with his practised artist’s eye and the dextrous manipulation of a pair of small scissors silhouette artist Charles Burns produced a study that was instantly recognisable as me. True, there are overtones of Winston Churchill about it. Makes a change from looking like his wartime colleague Lord Beaverbrook in old age, which is how I sometimes appear in photographs.

Charles, who comes from Emmer Green, Reading, was one of the ‘stars’ of last Thursday’s lunchtime reception at the Malmaison Hotel marking the 5th anniversary of the opening of Oxford Castle. His company, The Roving Artist Ltd, specialises in turning up at events like this and recording the guests for posterity.

You can find out more about his work on the website www.roving-artist.com. There I learned that one of the bashes he attended was the 80th birthday celebrations of The Queen.

Which leads very neatly to the events of May 5, 2006, when Her Majesty was in Oxford to perform the official opening of Oxford Castle, thereby launching what has since become an immensely valued part of the city’s entertainment and cultural scene.

That sunny day was naturally recalled by a number of the speakers last Thursday. One was Keith Mitchell, in surprisingly breezy form considering he had just survived an attempt by some Tory colleagues to overthrow him as county council leader. (Or perhaps the survival was why he was so good-humoured.) He told guests how the Castle’s developer Trevor Osborne, while showing the monarch over the Malmaison, had told her: “This is the first time I have been inside a bedroom with a queen.”

The royal response to this somewhat daring remark was not supplied.

The Malmaison, of course, was fashioned from what had previously been Oxford Prison. One of its cells remains as it was, a grim reminder of the inhuman conditions endured by prisoners here over many years.

For some they were not long endured. As often on visits to the hotel over the past five years, my eye wandered last Thursday to the end of the building that once housed the execution suite. The then chief executive of the county council, John Harwood, showed me around it during a Christmas party not long after the authority had taken over control of the building from the Home Office.

The cell allotted to the condemned men and the adjoining ‘drop’, reached along a white-tiled corridor, remained much as they were when last used in the 1950s. Only the rope was missing.