Not only do they warm your heart, they also open your eyes, seeing the familiar through the fresh lens of a newcomer.
Here's my top twenty tales of Oxford from the unashamedly touristy tour I took with Nick and Fay last weekend:
1. Another Time: there's a Gormley statue hidden just off Broad Street - how long has that been lurking there?
2. New Bodleian: designed by Gilbert Scott (the phone box chap), being refurbished thanks to Garfield Weston (the wagon wheel chap)
3. Old Indian Institute: John Betjeman dismissed it in 1938 as an “everlasting yellow building”, but who can't love the elephant with 'howdah' carriage?
4. William Morris: Oxford was home to two, the arts & crafts chap, and the minors & minis chap
5. Turf Tavern: "an education in intoxication", where Aussie premier Bob Hawke drank a yard of ale in 11 seconds, and Bill Clinton 'did not inhale'...
6. Hertford College, 'Bridge of Sighs': I like the myth that students here were so fat they closed the bridge so they'd get exercise from the stairs...
7. Radcliffe Camera: the guy who paid for it didn't like books, so maybe that's why there are 600,000 of them buried beneath it?
8. University Church of St Mary: scene of religious hatred over the years, but also proud birthplace of Oxfam
9. Bodlian Library Quad: King James and his two books - one talks of "a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain..." - but is it praying to his bible, or his counterblaste to tobacco?
10. Oxford Arms: an open book, to be read from top to bottom - in contrast to Cambridge's shut one. What can you learn from a closed volume? (But then, what good is a work open only at one page?)
11. Gargoyles: "a long and proud tradition of rudeness, mischief and disobedience" (Philip Pullman) - but there are also 9 new ones on the Bodleian, designed by local schoolchildren, including a dodo, three men in a boat - and tweedledum & tweedledee
12. Sheldonian theatre: fronted by ancient busts of philosophers (except they're emperors - and 1970s replacements!)
13. Wadham Quad: liberal, progressive, renowned for diversity and left-wing politics - I had to wait for the 'Free Palaestine' protesters to move so I could get a nice shot of the courtyard!
14. Wadham College: despite its enlightened reputation, and being founded by Dorothy, women were banned for centuries, with the only exception a laundress of 'such age, condition, and reputation as to be above suspicion'!
15. Rhodes college: as in Cecil Rhodes, founder of De Beers, Rhodesia, and Rhodes scholorships. Something of a colonialist, judging by his will: "Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings, what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence". Hmmm!
16. Keble college: some call it 'streaky bacon', a French visitor is said to have mistaken it for the train station, and neighbours St John's set up a club where the length of your membership depends on which colour bricks you steal!
17. Keble chapel: rather beautiful, and home of William Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite painting The Light of the World (1853) - though it's on loan to the National Gallery just now...
18. Rowing: quite a deal in these parts, bumping other colleges, boasting in graffiti, then getting oars broken and trying to mow down innocent protestors in the boat race...
19. St John's college: guilty of giving us Tony Blair, but makes up for it by running the Lamb and Flag pub, famous for hosting meetings of the VSO Oxford supporter group
20. All Souls: no undergraduates, sometimes no students as the entrance exams are so damn hard, and very occasionally a strange parade involving a mallard - a fitting end to our tour
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