As I was returning home from the Spitfire modelling club the other Sunday I found my progress along the old Ottery lane was obstructed by a troop of plodding bottoms. The local donkey sanctuary was out on a riding trip - the stupid beasts blocking the entire lane and slowing...

There will be people who get up in the cold this morning to race after dreams. Spring and a turn to warmer weather may look like a cruel joke right now, but on they will go - fortified by memories of the Olympic games. What a brief and entrancing interlude...

Last Tuesday Nicola Blackwood, the Oxford West and Abingdon MP, did not vote on the Gay marriage bill. This was not for want of trying by Oxford students. Indeed, given that she first stated that she was opposed to the bill, her decision to stay away from the vote counts...

Another day, another bitter ideological dispute in the dreaming spires. That was all I thought at first of the rancour about Julian Assange's invitation to the Oxford Union. In a place as full of educated and politically engaged people as Oxford you become inured to this sort of thing.