Ain't Russia brilliant?:Guy Martin on tour.

Guy Martin's like Brilliant Kid from The Fast Show and that's no criticism whatsoever. Quite the opposite. The Grimsby born lorry mechanic and TT racer turned travel show host is enthusiastic, curious, constantly chuckling, eager to have a go at almost anything, and seemingly quite unconcerned about risks to his own health and safety. His shows straddle a line between those of Simon Reeve (a light hearted geopolitical assessment of wherever he is) and the late Bolton steeplejack Fred Dibnah's take-me-as-you-find-me investigations into the nuts and bolts of mechanical engineering.

It's a surprisingly effective formula and for his latest series (following visits to China, India, and Latvia (his mother, Rita, was of Latvian heritage) he's off, like Reeve and Levison Wood before him, to Russia and he's keen to discover the Russia behind the (true) cliches regarding corruption, crushing of political dissent, and poisoning.

A military parade in Moscow may not be the best place to start doing this but Guy's zeal for discovery soon overcomes such obstacles. As Sting taught us "the Russians love their children too" so after a quick tour through Russian and Soviet history that takes us from 1917 to the present day via Lenin, the Bolsheviks, Stalin, the Cold War, Gorbachev, the break up of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin getting pissed up, the rise of the oligarchs, and former KGB man Vladimir Putin doing judo, sending people to prison, and fishing with his shirt off it's time for Guy to join his own little parade around Red Square and St Basil's.

Except he's not in a tank (you get the impression he'd like to be) but a very expensive ZiL car, and is restricted to travelling at no more than 20mph. Not that it's that easy to in Moscow anyway (unless you're a friend/crony of Putin and can use special lanes) as it's the second most congested city on Earth after Los Angeles.

I think if I lived in Moscow I'd much prefer to use the metro - and not just to avoid the traffic jams. The stations are famously ornate, full of stained glass windows, chandeliers, marble statues, socialist realist art and murals, and bronzed columns that are rubbed for luck. Above ground the architecture of Moscow impresses, or offends, in an even more ostentatious way. Moscow currently has seven of the ten tallest buildings in Europe, in fact London's Shard is the only non-Russian building in the top five.

This has led to the popularity of the extreme sport 'rooftopping', something that gave me vertigo just watching it on television, and Guy, sure enough, meets up with a couple of 'rooftoppers'. The FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, tend to turn a blind eye to rooftopping as long as it doesn't have a political dimension so you can climb to the top of the Federation Tower if you want, even become an Instagram celebrity by posing in ludicrously dangerous looking spots wearing high heels and evening dresses like Angela Nikolau, as long as you don't erect a Ukrainian flag while you're up there. Russian authorities aren't interested in enforcing health and safety rules, they're there to stop 'political' actions.

Going to prison isn't all bad though. I mean, it is almost definitely mostly very very bad indeed but it does have one bonus. Being an ex-con makes you ineligible for national service.

Should Russia descend into a lawless, Mad Max style, dystopia the rooftoppers and ex-cons won't be the only ones already at an advantage. The Night Wolves biker group, known as Putin's own Hell's Angels, have built a workshop/nightclub that houses steampunk contraptions they've made that look like crosses between David Smith sculptures and something from a Hollywood reboot of Robot Wars.

The fact they still blame, not totally incorrectly, the West for the crash under Yeltsin and that the Night Wolves, and many others in Russia, also hate Europe's 'tolerance' of homosexuality, incorrectly (obvs), makes it pretty clear who these 'Hell's Angels' think are the real enemy.

There seem to be quite a few people in Russia who miss the days of being a super power and that, perhaps, explains the current expansionist policies, the meddling in foreign elections, and the bullish behaviour of Putin and his gang.

For a look back at a time when there was absolutely no doubting the Soviet Union's place at the top table of global politics Guy is shown round Moscow's Space Museum and regaled with stories of the space race between the USSR and the US, the first sputnik (1957), Laika, Elka, and Strelka the space dogs, Yuri Gagarin the space man, and even shown a sample of moon soil given by Neil Armstrong to the museum. Tests showed it to be exactly the same as the moon soil collected by Russian cosmonauts proving, comprehensively, that the moon landings were not faked. For that to happen Russia and the US would've had to have colluded. As if that would ever happen?

Russian dogs weren't just sent into space but used as kamikaze pilots in wars too! A practice that was later taken up, less successfully, by the Japanese army and Iraqi insurgents. The dogs obviously died but plenty of other Russian military 'hardware' is still knocking around and being used for 'leisure' activities now.

Guy visits a privatised former air base and pilots an L-39 Albatros (it's the one Pierce Brosnan's James Bond uses in Tomorrow Never Dies). After, what appears to be, a very brief training session, he's permitted to take the jet up for a few barrel rolls, a couple of loops, and even to execute an extremely low daisy cutter over other people's heads. The plane is just eight metres from the ground. UK law states a minimum of 150 metres.

If Russians don't seem too bothered about health and safety (or political correctness gone mad as morons like to call it) they seem equally unconcerned with temperatures that would see the UK grind to a halt and the army called out. -25 is mild enough for most Russians to go for a nice day out.

Or, in Archangel, work. Archangel is the only place in Europe to have diamond mines and here we see giant trucks carrying ninety tonne loads up hills to be sifted through by 'sorters' who, at the end of each shift, have their hair, nostrils, ears, and even their arseholes checked in case they're nicking them. Nobody has been found attempting to steal one yet and Guy, game as ever, whips his pants off for an inspection after a short shift on the sorting desk. I'd never really thought about the actual business of diamond mining before so this, as with much of this fine series, was an education to me. I even learnt that every diamond that exists is at least one billion years old!

The Kamez truck factory in Naberezhnye Chelny may deal with more modern, and less expensive, goods but it's still a huge place. Twenty-three square miles in total, the city around it was built to support the factory not vica versa. Needless to say Guy has a drive in one of these monsters that nowadays dominate the Dakar rally just as surely as they pollute the planet.

Another Russian invention that's almost certainly done way more harm than good is the Kalashnikov. Izhevsk in the Udmurt Republic used to be most famous for Tchaikovsky but it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that Mikhail Kalashnikov, now, is a more recognisable name to many. The AK-47s he developed were owned by the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and are estimated to kill 250,000 people every year.

Mikhail himself was said to feel bad about how his weapon had been appropriated (though it seems unclear what the fuck people were gonna use it for) but the Russian Orthodox church, which (like most churches) loves nothing more than a bit of indiscriminate murder, told him he was a 'patriot' for doing this and the Russian Minister of Culture claimed the gun is "the true cultural brand of Russia.

Six thousand people work in Izhevsk's Kalashnikov factory. A number, thankfully, dwarfed by the nearly half a million who work on the Russian railways. The Trans-Siberian is, famously, the largest railway in the world and Irkutsk in Siberia (cue some footage of Stalin and the gulags) hosts one of its biggest depots as well as an immense paper mill, twelve miles long, making pulp for anything from bank notes to pizza boxes.

The timber comes from the taiga (the Siberian boreal forest) which is so vast it absorbs a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide. The lumberjacks who work it look to have a hard life but at least they get to knock off if the temperature drops below -40. Two things that never seek to amaze about Russia, and travel programmes never tire of telling us, is that it's bloody big and it's bloody cold. Russians, apparently, joke "the colder it gets the more ice cream we sell".

Although it seems booze is a more popular method of getting you through the night or, indeed, day. While Simon Reeve travelled to Tuva to witness some truly tragic cases, Guy Martin, has, of course, kept it a bit perkier. He's at Buguldeika on the shores of Lake Baikal to witness a shamanic dance before retiring to a yurt for some hospitality which seems to consist mainly of getting pissed on the triple measures of the local loopy juice they serve up. The milky concoction causes him to wince but is fairly effective in getting him 'trolleyed'. It's a good way (or is it?) to prepare for a trip across the border to Ukraine and Chernobyl.

You could see a trip to Ukraine in a documentary nominally about Russia as 'mission creep' or even as politically insensitive but you just know Guy Martin desperately wants to have a nose around Chernobyl. It's his kind of place. I visited Ukraine back in 2009 and wanted to go myself but you need to book in advance. It's surprisingly popular with tourists and the money generated helps to fund Ukrainian resistance to pro-Russian forces illegally annexing parts of the east of the country.

On the 26th of April 1986 Chernobyl became the biggest nuclear disaster ever (so big that the programme makers can only get across its enormity with the use of some Faux Cyrillic lettering, it seems) and now Chernobyl is surrounded by a 1000 square mile exclusion zone. When visiting Guy has to go through checkpoints at eighteen and six miles from the plant itself.

The death toll is highly disputed ranging from 2 (or zero in one slightly blinkered case) to 29 to 90,000! Part of the reason for these discrepancies is that the Soviet government (who'd scrimped on safety measures insisting the reactor was safe enough to install in Red Square) tried to cover up the disaster. It wasn't until warning signs started going off in Stockholm that the Swedes twigged what the Soviets already knew but weren't saying. The fallout covered most of Europe. As far away as Cumbria they only stopped testing sheep for Chernobyl radiation as recently as 2012.

The 'shield' itself that covers the reactor is the size of Wembley Stadium but the 'sarcophagus', the molten core, the 'elephant's foot' as it's been nicknamed has 'suicidal' levels of radiation and very very few people have risked going inside. One man who has, and survived, is Sergei who went in there to take photos. Guy meets him and Sergei puts it down to being a tough Russian and believing in God. Make your mind up, Sergei, although fair play, comrade.

The town (now a ghost town) of Pripyat was founded in February 1970 to serve Chernobyl and life there was said to be good, far better than most other towns in the Soviet Union at the time, before the reactor exploded a day before a new amusement park was due to open. Fifty thousand citizens of Pripyat were evacuated and told they'd be back within three days. They're still not back. Images of burnt out dodgems and a rusty ferris wheel tell some part of that story but they don't tell it all.

It doesn't tell the story of the rescue workers, the 'liquidators', whose eyes changed from brown to blue due to the strength of the radiation and when they died, as many quickly did, had to be buried in lead coffins to stop the spread of gamma rays, but it also doesn't tell the story of the animals who, popular legend has it, thrive in the exclusion zone.

That's not strictly true. Some do and some don't. There are wild dogs, cats, moose (!), foxes, and firebugs thriving but some flora and fauna has mutated and twisted out of shape and/or died. If you only survey the animals left alive, and not the dead ones, you're in danger of coming to false conclusions. There's clearly a certain amount of radiation that is good for living things but would you be the one who wanted to find out how much?

Estimates say the site will not be safe for human habitation for another 20,000 years but it's not only dogs, foxes, and moose that can disprove these estimates but people too. Some hardy souls, a couple of hundred of them, have defied orders and chosen to continue living within the exclusion zone and they're not, as you might expect a bunch of crusties, environmental activists, or some extra macho chapter of the Night Wolves.

In fact, Guy meets a baba, a feisty Ukrainian grandmother, who pretty much orders Guy and his crew to fix her 'sticky' gate (not a euphemism). Those who stayed on in and around Chernobyl live, on average, a decade longer than those who left. The trauma of relocation is posited as a theory but surely the trauma of living through, and still living in the site of, the world's worst nuclear catastrophe was traumatic enough. It sounds like we still don't know enough about what happened in Chernobyl but, at least, we now know, thanks to the likes of Guy Martin, a little more about what life is like there as well as in neighbouring Russia (if not, from this series, elsewhere in Ukraine).

For once, in one of Guy Martin's travelogues, he neither entered a race or did some sort of sporting challenge but, in common with all of the other programmes I've seen him present, he proved an affable, inquisitive, and energetic host who presided over a fun, slightly lightweight, but, nonetheless, very informative and enjoyable show. I'd go on holiday with him as long as he doesn't make me barrel roll an L-39 Albatros, go rooftopping, or spend more than two minutes in anywhere that's -40. In fact Our Guy in Havana has a nice ring to it, for some reason!

Fleapit revisited:BlacKkKlansman.

"America First" - slogan on the Ku Klux Klan 'coin' struck in 1965 to celebrate 100 years of the Klan.

"America First" - campaign slogan of Donald Trump, 45th and current President of the United States.

When white supremacists marched through the city of Charlottesville, Virginia carrying swastikas and Confederate flags (and resulting in the death of 32 year old local Heather Heyer) just over a year ago Donald Trump, instead of condemning unconditionally the fascists and terrorists who had arrived in the town ostensibly to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee, instead described some of them as "very fine people". A comment that, quite correctly, aroused much anger among those who thought America was supposed to stand for equality and fairness and was supposed to condemn terrorism, not support it explicitly.

It's against this backdrop that Spike Lee's new 'joint', BlacKkKlansman arrives. Although the film is set in 1979 the parallels between then and now are as blatant and obvious as a racist in the Oval Office. If it seems like the film's references to 'America First' and 'Make America Great Again' are overegging this powerful and potent pudding then they're really not. With a thousand or so extreme right wingers marching through Charlottesville, the Grand Wizard David Duke enjoying a higher profile than he has in years, and an estimated 8,000 KKK members active now in the US this really isn't the time to tickle racists out of being racist. If you don't walk out of this film feeling sad, angry, and yet hugely energised and wanting to punch the nearest Nazi you're probably part of the problem.

Ron Stallworth was, in real life, the first African-American police officer in Colorado Springs. Joining the force in the late seventies this articulate, likeable, yet still streetwise (check the afro) rookie soon moved from the drudgery and racial humiliation of the records department to become a detective assigned to wear a wire and go undercover at a talk by prominent Civil Rights campaigner, and black power advocate, Stokely Carmichael who, by then, had changed his name to Kwame Ture to celebrate his African roots as well as marking the inauguration of the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and Ahmed Sekou Toure, who fulfilled the same role in Guinea.

There Ron (played in the film by John David Washington, Denzel's son) meets the president of the student union at Colorado College, Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier). Dumas is every bit Stallworth's equal both in idealism and intelligence and if we're talking hairstyles her 'fro puts his to shame. They appear to be falling in love but it seems uncertain if this is merely Stallworth taking his work to the next level. Equally, has Stallworth fallen under the spell of the immensely powerful Ture (Corey Hawkins).

Ron's torn between his job and his conscience and he tries to circle that square by taking it upon himself to embark on a far more dangerous, though far more beneficial to society, venture. He decides to take on the Ku Klux Klan - by becoming a member.

If this was fiction you'd have trouble believing it happened but this is, for the most part, a true story. Stallworth rings up his local chapter of the KKK, says some racist stuff down the phone to them, and agrees to meet up with the chapter's president Walter Breachway (Ryan Eggold). To get round the glaringly obvious problem Stallworth gets his colleague Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver, he of Lincoln, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Frances Ha) to go to the rendez vouz in his place. Stallworth will be Stallworth on the phone but Zimmerman will be Stallworth during face to face meetings.

This unlikely premise leads, of course, to all manner of tension. Will Breachway twig he's being played? Will his sidekick, the unhinged anti-semitic gun nut Felix Kendrickson (Jasper Paakkonen), expose Flip's Jewishness? Will Ivanhoe, a drunken chump played by Paul Walter Hauser in a role none too dissimilar to the one he played in the recent I, Tonya, accidentally blow them all up?

When Stallworth connects with David Duke, the Grand Wizard himself is played by Topher Grace, the tension ramps up further and by the time Stallworth is appointed, in his role as an everyday cop, to be Duke's security detail during a visit to Colorado Springs we're coiled as tight as springs. It's one of many set pieces in the film that are masterfully handled by an expert, and experienced, director. There's also humour in some scenes but we rein ourselves in after each burst of laughter as we realise this, more or less, actually happened, and, most chilling of all, nothing has really changed and, right now, we're starting to head backwards.

If it wasn't for the current political shitstorm this would still work as a great thriller. Washington, Driver, Harrier, Grace, Eggold, and Paakkonen all deliver brilliant performances as do Ashlie Atkinson as Felix's simple, but eager to please, racist wife Connie, and Frederick Weller as dumb, sexually abusive, and equally racist cop Landers (there's a slight touch of Sam Rockwell's Dixon from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri about him but this is a much more serious, and a much better, film).

There are cameos from Alec Baldwin as fictional white supremacist academician Dr. Kennebrew Beaureguard, Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Clay Davis in The Wire, shiiiiiiiiiiiiit), and, most powerfully of all, the 91 year old Harry Belafonte whose now frail voice adds a dignity to his role as Jerome Turner. He tells the story of his childhood friend, Jesse Washington, who was accused of raping and murdering a girl in Waco, Texas before being tried by a kangaroo court, lynched, beaten, castrated, and having his fingers pulled off and sold as macabre souvenirs to the braying crowds that attended the lynching. Many of them, as was the case with these regular events, bringing picnics to enjoy the day.

As Belafonte/Turner speaks he's surrounded by actual photographs of Washington's charred corpse and the footage is interspersed with Klan members being inducted into 'the organisation' (the invisible empire must never be referred to as the Klan or the KKK by its members) by Duke before watching a screening of D.W.Griffiths' The Birth of a Nation, the highly controversial 1915 silent film that was responsible for rejuvenating the KKK and thus directly leading to the murder of African-Americans. How many we'll never know. The Klan didn't release data and the police mostly left them to it.

It's a neat trick by Spike Lee to use some of the revolutionary film making techniques pioneered by Griffiths in The Birth of a Nation, crosscutting, tracking shots, to tell a story that aims to redress the balance, to take back power, and to create equality instead of division. BlacKkKlansman also begins with shots of the civil war dead from 1939's Gone With The Wind, another film with problematic portrayals of its black characters.

Lee doesn't just delve into cinema history but employs a soundtrack worthy of a blaxploitation movie or an episode of Soul Train (James Brown, The Temptations, The Cornelius Brothers, even Prince appears) to help tell a story that underpins his assertion, made in a Q&A beamed in live from the BFI Southbank after the screening, that a nation built on dispossessing, and killing, the native population before abducting people from Africa and forcing them into slavery to work the land for the benefit of the white invaders needs to come to terms with its true story and not adhere to ludicrous and false creation myths propagated by Trump and his cronies and defended to the death by the NRA to the degree that the deaths of its own citizens, and its own children, is now considered mere collateral damage in the war against truth. The United States own Declaration of Independence decrees that 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness' are three 'unalienable rights'. Yet some, many, still think all that Second Amendment shit about bearing arms is more important.

The Q&A, or at least Spike's contribution to it, shone further light on the hot topics raised by the film. Spike spoke about how the film came his way on the recommendation of Jordan Peele (Get Out), how international audiences should not think this is a uniquely American problem (he cited Brexit as an example of this and in Boris Johnson's use of the word 'pickaninny' (one of many favoured racial slurs used by the Klan) and his meetings with extreme right wing agitator Steve Bannon we're beginning to see just how clear these parallels are), and how white power, extreme right wing, actions that result in people dying should not be labelled violence but terrorism because these people, not just the KKK of the 1970s but also the driver of the car in Charlottesville that killed Heather Heyer, are terrorists, but he also spoke of how he wanted to make a big exciting, politically expedient, feature film like Chinatown, Dog Day Afternoon, or Serpico. He's certainly succeeded in that.

Ten years ago BlacKkKlansman would've seemed like a missive from a dim and distant past but in 2018 it felt terrifyingly topical. I thought I'd admire the film and I did. I wasn't sure if I'd love it. I did that too. I exhort you to go and see it and to see it now. Before it's too late.

Thanks to Pam, Sarah, and, especially, Gary for joining me for this brilliant, and important, film. "Very fine people".

TADS #23:Oxford (or Dreaming Spires and Oxford Commas).

"Humid the air, yet soft as spring
The tender purple spray on copse and briers!
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires
She needs not June for beauty's heightening,
Lovely all the time she lies, lovely to-night" - Thyrsis, Matthew Arnold.

"I wonder if anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speak" - WB Yeats.

"Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure" - Henry James.

"The clever men at Oxford
Know all there is to be knowed
But they none of them know one half as much
As Intelligent Mr Toad" - The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame.

It's always good to blood a new person into the cult of TADS and we'd not had that pleasure since Tina joined us for our Eastleigh to Winchester walk back in May. Much like Tina, Colin may be new to TADS but he's hardly an unfamiliar face. Like Tina, many of us have known him for the best part of thirty years. I think he's the first ever person who beat me at Trivial Pursuit. The git!

Also as a long time resident of Oxford and its environs he would prove invaluable in confirming, or refuting, my stories of the city and, in many cases, he'd be able to put some flesh on the bones of that very same, and very brief, potted history.

Pam and I had met in Victoria station at 1000hrs and caught the coach to Oxford where we met Colin, Adam, Teresa, Shep, Neil, Eamon, Bee, and Tina at Oxford station at noon and soon we were off along Botley Road to pick up the Thames Path at Osney Bridge (the bridge with the lowest headroom of any across the navigable Thames).

Soon, after a couple of picturesque bridges, the algae filled Fiddler's Stream flanked us to the right as the Thames did to our left leading us past Cripley Meadow Allotments before feeding into the Castle Mill Stream which makes up the southern border of the vast grazing land/floodplain that is Port Meadow.

These are the backwaters of the Thames where once stood a castle besieged in the winter of 1142 when Empress Matilda/Queen Maud, daughter and dispossessed heir of Henry I, lived there during her power struggle with King Stephen.

Port Meadow itself is beautiful. Cows of many colours mooched about, one taking a particular interest in a beached boat, and they were even joined by a small group of horses. It's said that Port Meadow has not been ploughed for 4,000 years and legend has it that our old friend Alfred the Great (having cropped up in both Wantage and Winchester he's becoming as much a feature of these walks as Graham Greene, Rupert Brooke, real ale, punctuation, and curry) gave Port Meadow to the Freemen of Oxford for helping him out against the Danes. Legend also claims that Alfred founded the city in the tenth century. Having died in 899 that seems unlikely.

In more recent history Lewis Carroll and the Reverend Robin Duckworth took a boat ride along the Thames (or Isis as some Oxonians prefer) with three little girls:- Lorina, Edith, and Alice Liddell. During the journey Carroll made up a story about Alice and her adventures in Wonderland. Further fantasties were lived out on Port Meadow during the eighties and nineties when it became a popular spot for raves and free festivals.

We carried along the Thames Path, stopping for photographs and for me to read the poems and quotes at the start of this piece on an upturned tree, until we reached a sign for asparagus (next left apparently, one for the HMHB fans) and, eventually, the ruins of Godstow Abbey.

Dating from 1133, Henry II's mistress, Rosamund Clifford, died here c1176 but her grave, in the grounds, is now lost. In 1539 the Second Act of Dissolution suppressed the abbey and it was converted into a family home before being irreparably damaged during the English Civil War. Locals used its stone for their new buildings.

When the German travel writer Paul Hentzner visited in 1612 he said, of Rosamund's grave, "here in a tomb lies a rose of the world, not a pure rose. She who used to smell sweet, still smells - but not sweet". I guess early 17c German humour doesn't translate, and hasn't aged, well.

We went to the pub. The first of two on this walk that have such illustrious histories they even have their own Wikipedia pages. The Trout Inn in Wolvercote doesn't just have a Wikipedia page though. It has a resident peacock. Krug. Krug wandered around showing off and posing for photos and even allowed Pam to feed him. His wings, his colours, spectacularly beautiful but his gnarled manky feet revealing him to be basically a pimped up chicken.

I shan't get aeriated about galliformes though. The Grade II listed pub itself crops up in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage, and, like many places round here, Inspector Morse. In 2001 Bill Clinton visited with his daughter, Chelsea, who, like her father before her, was then studying at University College, one of thirty-eight constituent colleges of Oxford University.

We'd be seeing more. But, first a pint. I wanted Oxford Gold (good to support the local brewers) but, alas, it was off so I took a Wainwright's and we sat by the side of the river as the sun poked its head out from behind the clouds for the first time all day. A pub garden, sunshine, a beer, friends, a peacock named Krug, for me a small slice of heaven on Earth.

On departing we headed through the quaint, yet practical looking, village of Wolvercote past two other tempting looking hostelries and on towards the Oxford Canal which we would take south back into Oxford proper. The Oxford Canal links Oxford with Bedworth in Warwickshire, completed in 1790 it's seventy-eight miles long (though the Oxford Canal Walk manages to add a bonus four miles to that) and is part of the E2 European long distance path which travels 3,010 miles from Galway to Nice. A project for the future perhaps!?

Integrated with both the Thames and the Grand Union Canal we saw pristine narrowboats, ones that looked ready to sink, and lots of cats. As we passed under a series of bridges we looked out at gardens that rolled gently down to the water and speculated how much use they actually got. Do people sit in these gardens with a book and a glass of wine or do they draw the curtains and watch Eastenders? A range of views was proffered. Not for the last time that day.

We passed by Burgess Field, Trap Grounds Allotments, and the other side of Port Meadow before we came off the canal near Jericho, stopped for a Twirl and a lottery ticket (!), and came out on Woodstock Road and our first college.

Saint Anne's isn't the most traditionally pretty college, architecturally speaking, but it has an interesting story. It began life as part of the Association for the Education of Women in 1878 as the first institution in Oxford to allow education of women. In 1979 it became co-ed and it's alumni include Susan Sontag, Polly Toynbee, Melanie Phillips, Kevin MacDonald, Helen Fielding, Edwina Currie, and Danny Alexander. I asked people to cheer for names they liked and boo those they didn't. I even thought of doing a quiz at the end of the walk but the look on Shep's face when I revealed I'd written five sides of A4 about the day suggested I was skating on thin ice as it was!

Next we passed St John's College, a men's college since its 1555 foundation it too became co-ed in '79 and its alumni include Tony Blair (boo), Alan Duncan, Angela Eagle, Kingsley Amis, Victoria Coren Mitchell (a cheer, from me at least), Evan Davis, Philip Larkin, Yannis Philippakis of the band Foals, Edward Maufe (who, as the architect responsible for Guildford Cathedral, I was surprised, even disappointed, nobody remembered), and the 18c agricultural pioneer Jethro Tull. Not the dude with mad eyes who stands on one leg playing the flute.

Inspector Morse, too, went to St John's - or he would've done if he was real. The nearby Lamb & Flag pub is owned and operated by St John's and the college was initially founded, by Sir Thomas White (a cloth merchant from Reading), with the aim of providing a source of educated Roman Catholic clerics to support Queen Mary's counter-reformation.

The sixteenth century was a hotbed of religious divide in England and, very close nearby, we can see the Martyrs Memorial. Not, as Colin and his Oxford friends like to cheekily tell tourists, the spire of an underground cathedral but an 1843 George Gilbert Scott (Albert Memorial, St Pancras railway station) design commemorating the Oxford Martyrs (Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Anglican bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley) who were tried for heresy and burnt at the stake near here in 1555/6 during the Reformation. The memorial was consciously patterned on the Eleanor Crosses, which those who attended my Art Deco walk last summer will know all about. Colin even showed us the cross on the road nearby that marked the actual spot the three men were burnt to death.

Neaby Balliol College was founded in 1263 and Balliol men (and they were all men back then) were described by former alumnus H.H.Asquith (PM from 1908-1916 and the man who took us into World War I) as possessing the "the tranquil consciousness of an effortless superiority". Have a look at this list and see if you agree:- Adam Smith, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene (yay), Howard Marks, Richard Dawkins, Christoper Hitchens, Robert Peston, William Rees-Mogg (boos, mainly for his awful son), Cressida Dick (a woman!), Hilaire Belloc, Matthew Arnold. Gerald Manley Hopkins, Boris Johnson (biggest boo of the day), Yvette Cooper, Denis Healey, Edward Heath, Roy Jenkins, and John Wycliffe. With a few noble exceptions there's a lot, a helluva lot, of entitlement in that list. Far more than there is "effortless superiority".

By now we were in the tourist centre of Oxford. You can buy 'squishies' or listen to the gentle sounds of a lady playing a harp or you could, if you were us, head over to Carfax, long considered the centre of Oxford. Dominated by St Martin's, or Carfax, Tower (all that remains of the 12c St Martin's church). At 74ft tall the word on the street is that no building in central Oxford is allowed to be built higher. You can take the stairs up it to take in the views but my thirsty walkers seemed more interested in going to the pub. More eager to meet the Martins than explore St Martin's!

I was making them do a bit of work first though. We took in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin (SMV) from whence the university grew and the site of the trial of the aforementioned Oxford Martyrs. The tower dates from 1270 and the spire from the 1320s. With beer a priority nobody fancied looking in to admire the Italian Renaissance painter Farncesco Bassano the Younger's late 17c Adoration of the Shepherds.

The spire of the church is considered one of England's most beautiful but the High Street on which it stands has received even more overwhelmingly positive reviews. Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described it as "one of the world's great streets", Thomas Hardy, in Jude the Obscure, wrote "ha'nt another like it in the world", and, in 1810, JMW Turner, immortalised it in an oil painting.

St Mary's Passage opens up on to Radcliffe Square and the spectacular Radcliffe Camera. Inspired by the Venetian Andrea Palladio and designed in the English Palladian style by James Gibbs (also known for his two great London churches, St Mary-le-Strand and St Martin-in-the-Fields) it was built between 1737 and 1749 to house the Radcliffe Science Library (funded from the estate of Oxford legend Dr John Radcliffe). It's the first example of a circular library in England and has cropped up in Tolkien, Pullman, and Dorothy Sayers.

It's not the biggest though. Not even the biggest in Oxford. That honour goes to the nearby Bodleian, one of Europe's oldest, which holds 12,000,000 books, second only to the British Library in London. This area, however, truly is one of the UK's, Europe's, or even Earth's, greatest architectural set pieces. Sharing the scene with the Radcliffe and the Bodleian are Nicholas Hawksmoor's 1711-1715 Neoclassical Clarendon Building, and Christopher Wren's (you may've heard of him, he built St Paul's Cathedral) Sheldonian Theatre from 1669. Decorated, as with many local buildings, by gargoyles both grotesque and gormless it seems its establishment dates from Gilbert Sheldon's seventeenth century tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury in which he wished to separate the supposedly then equally worshipped deities God (a popular Christian god) and Apollo (representing Roman and Greek mythology).

A saxophonist was busking nearby to raise money to tour Europe in a motorhome. Considering the plight of many at the moment it was hard to be sympathetic to his cause. More importantly (to me) my phone had gone a bit weird and was adding, annoyingly, weird lines of text to my photographs which I couldn't remove and, more importantly still, the pub was just the other side of the Bridge of Sighs!

The Bridge of Sighs crosses New College Lane and if it's not quite as pretty as the one that spans the Cam in Cambridge (this is more about bicycles than punts) it's still quite special. It joins two parts of Hertford College (alumni:- Jonathan Swift, John Donne, Charles James Fox, Fiona Bruce, Nick Cohen, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Natasha Kaplinsky, Evelyn Waugh) and, pedants have pointed out, it's actually structurally more similar to another famous Venetian bridge, the Rialto, than it is that city's Bridge of Sighs.

Sigh! We turned down the snicket that is St Helen's Passage and met Tony, Alex, Grace, Izzie, Rob, Naomi, Maya, and Zachary in the very crowded, but very beautiful, Turf Tavern. There were eighteen of us. We weren't going to get a table in one of the most atmospheric pubs in one of Britain's most visited towns on a late Saturday afternoon in August. What were we thinking?

So we took some photos and retired to the nearby King's Arms, a pub decorated with nearly as many hefty tomes as the Bodleian! I had a pint, two in fact, of Yellow Hammer and we all caught up with each other's news before I rudely interrupted with my Turf Tavern 'facts'.

Tony was quick to pint out that the Turf Tavern's resident ghost, Rosie, who drowned herself in a nearby moat after her lover failed to return from the civil war may not, strictly speaking, be a fact as such. "FAKE NEWS" I screamed petulantly to no avail but I was on safer ground with assertions that former Aussie PM Bob Hawke, in 1963, set a world record by drinking a yard of ale in eleven seconds there and that Bill Clinton definitely did not inhale when he smoked a joint in the pub garden many moons ago.

The Turf Tavern has also, since it was built in 1381, been visited by Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Thatcher (a boo to rival Boris the bullshitter), and Stephen Hawking (a mighty cheer). The Lamb & Flag in Hardy's Jude the Obscure is inspired by The Turf Tavern which is a bit confusing as Oxford also has a Lamb & Flag. Oxford has lots of nice pubs. We may not have got in the one we wanted but the back up option proved decent.

Naomi, Maya, Zachary, and the Martin family all left us at this point. I felt I'd hardly had time to speak but it'd been great to see them and my heart melted when Zachary ran over to give me a massive hug to say goodbye (I'd been trying to set up a kind of Whack-A-Croc using the four children's heads but it wasn't going well).

Rob joined us for the rest of our walk as we rejoined the High Street via the higgledy-piggledy, and, thanks to a well positioned bollard, free from motorised transport, Queen's Lane. It took us past St Edmund's, or Teddy, Hall. The last surviving medieval hall at Oxford its students have included Robin Day, Keir Starmer, Al Murray, and Stewart Lee. Nobody booed.

Soon we passed Magdalen, so wealthy it has its own deer park, where at sunrise on May mornings the college choir can be heard singing from the Magdalen Tower (1509).

I wouldn't normally share pictures of myself on here (at least not THREE in a row) but I was rather pleased with how these came out. I look both distinguished and happy (which of course I am). I don't expect anybody else to think I look good but I still like myself! Here I'm stood on the Cherwell spanning Magdalen Bridge, students famously injure themselves jumping off it, where punting goes on peacefully below. The bridge, designed by John Gwynn of Shrewsbury, was built between 1772 and 1790 and the Cherwell runs forty miles from near Daventry in Northamptonshire until it reaches the Thames, we'd be following it to that particular confluence.

But first some Magdalen alumni:- Oscar Wilde, John Betjeman, Edward VIII, William Hague (boo), Jeremy Hunt (boo), Dominic Grieve (dilemma for this anti-Brexit Tory), George Osborne (another anti-Brexit Tory but a smug tosser who thoroughly deserved a boo anyway), AC Grayling, Desmond Morris, Ben Goldacre, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Julia Hartley-Brewer (a boo from me), Dudley Moore, Louis Theroux, Lawrence of Arabia, and, er, Bertie Wooster!

Just over the bridge where the nearby Plain roundabout splits the High Street into three (St Clement's, Cowley Road, and Iffley Road) sits the athletics track where Roger Bannister ran the world's first sub four minute mile (Rob and I have been running round Oxford for years now and we're still some way off that mark) but we didn't have time to visit. Instead we headed past the oldest botanical gardens in Britain (dating to 1621) into Christ Church Meadow.

This is a beautiful stretch, often you can see people painting the spires from here, that looks across the meadow to the skyline of Oxford and we chose the right time of day to do it. The sun was low covering the whole scene with an almost magical blanket of ultra vivid colours. The greens looked greener than ever, the water more pristine, those punting seemed to be enjoying their wine and Pimms that little bit more in this light. In 1784 the pastry chef James Sadler made the first hot air balloon ascent by an Englishman on this very meadow.

So evocative, so reflective. We reached the confluence of the Cherwell as it drained into Old Father Thames and turned right into Poplar Walk towards Christ Church Cathedral, a building unique in being both cathedral (for Oxon, Berks, and Bucks) and college chapel. Tom Tower, named for its bell Great Tom, was designed by Wren and built in 1681/2 and Tom Quad is Oxford's largest college quad.

Christ Church the college was founded in 1546 by Henry VIII and has cropped up in the works of Shakespeare whilst the dining hall was used for Harry Potter films (if that's your thing). Alumni include Lewis Carroll, John Wesley, Anthony Eden, Edward VII, David Dimbleby, Sir Robert Peel, George Canning, Gladstone, Nigel Lawson, Edward de Bono, Albert Einstein, Robert Hooke, Max Mosley, John Ruskin, Richard Curtis, WH Auden, Riz Ahmed, and Ludovic Kennedy.

A mouthwatering list that had surely earned us another pint. We made haste to The Head of the River, a popular destination for a post-art or post-run Oxford debrief, which has, sadly, due to incompetent and rude staff gone downhill. We stood ignored at the bar for some minutes before being told we needed to go to another bar because they weren't serving there. We did this only to be ignored again as the staff either shuffled chairs around, chatted amongst themselves, or, the final insult, started serving people at the bar we'd just been requested to vacate. We asked why this was and was told "they came in". We came in too but, now, we walked out. We didn't get a drink but they lost at least £60 of business from us that day and, surely, hundreds of pounds in future custom that will now be taken elsewhere. I was so incensed I went on Trip Advisor and only the 'absolute cunt' (sometimes I have to quote myself) who acts as landlord of the Harrow Inn on Ightham Common had angered me enough to do that in the past.

Hunger was taking over from thirst by now so we headed straight to the very lovely 4500 Miles From Delhi in the City Centre. Cobra and Kingfisher beer was dispensed and my chilli paneer and tandoori roti combo was delicious and not as spicy as the three chillis on the menu suggested it might be. Rather satisfyingly, and as if to mark the passing of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, both a coffee and a naan were ordered.

We laughed, we chatted, and we argued about politics, religion, and, mostly, the ethics (or lack of ethics) of social media giants like Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, and, more than all of 'em, Facebook. It got a bit heated at times and I certainly said a couple of things that came more from anger than common sense but the main shame was some friends not involved in the 'debate' looked bored by it. It's never good to bore people so I apologise for that. Truth be told we were engaged in what Vince Cable memorably called "the narcissism of small differences" in which people who hold very very similar views end up arguing the toss about the minutiae of things. It's not something you imagine concerns Donald Trump's people!

The day, the night, seemed to be over too soon. Colin had left before the meal. Next Adam and Teresa shot off followed by Pam, and Rob before Shep, Tina, Neil, Bee, Eamon, and myself headed to The White Rabbit for lasties. Shep and Tina had a very swift one before they head to catch a train but the rest of us wrong 'uns ended up necking another three pints while the friendly bar staff and clients enjoyed the sounds of Bloc Party, Parquet Courts, and the recently departed Aretha Franklin. RESPECT indeed to The White Rabbit staff for showing those at The Head of the River how to work a bar. We'd taken another trip to Wonderland and this time we'd not even had to worry about being blown off a cliff to our certain deaths on the rocks below. It'd been flat, it'd been easy, and it'd been fun.

Thanks to Pam, Neil, Bee, Eamon, Shep, Tina, Teresa, Adam, Rob, Naomi, Maya, Zachary, Tony, Alex, Grace, Izzie, and my co-pilot Colin for making an interesting day a fun one too. Next month we're leaving the Thames for a walk along the Ouse from Newhaven to Lewes but in October we'll be back on it briefly when we head to Gravesend before working our way through the beautiful Kentish countryside to Rochester and the Medway. By then I'll be fifty years old. Hopefully I won't need a stick.