Dreaming spires, screeching tyres, deadlocked traffic, large boats with too many large people in them, students with deathwishes on bikes, ponces in gowns and stuffed shirts in tuxedos, tweed-jacketed hacks living in the 1940s, 200-year-old lecturers wearing graph-paper shirts and knitted green ties, tourists blocking the streets as far as the eye can see...

Welcome to Oxford, a place where in the year 1250 there was nothing more than a small bridge which allowed oxes to cross a ford. Then some poncy academic from a French university came along and decided it looked like a more pleasant study environment than the shit-filled streets of 13th century Paris, at which point the ox-ford became irrelevant. 800 years on and look at some of the stuff that has popped up when people let their guard down for a split second: The university - Well duh! The City of Oxford - Everything you will ever need to know about Oxford The Oxford Union - The last bastion of the right-wing opportunist hack, and about the only place left in the world where it's OK to be a Tory under the age of 70.