My birthday this year was lovely. Big brother Ed and his wife Cat came to Oxford for a couple of days. They were hoping to go on an Inspector Morse tour - so, because the official tour only runs on Saturdays, I gave them their very own private Morse tour. We started with a detour to the River Cherwell for some punting, which is far more fun and far more strenuous for the legs than I’d imagined. Then it was off to the Randolph Hotel for a round of drinks the cost of which reached double-digits, then to the Ashmolean - alas, closed, so we had to make do with a peek at their outdoor exhibition of celebrities with scribble on their faces - and on to the Eagle and Child, favourite watering hole of Tolkein and the other Lewis (CS) for a spot of lunch that cost less than the drinks at the Randolph. Next up was the recently refurbished Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford’s natural history museum, and one of my favourites) and yet another drink, this time at the wonderful Turf Tavern.

At the Randolph, the Eagle and Child, and the Turf

It was nice to have such a structure to our tourism without the pressure of moving from stop to stop with a group of lost souls, but unfortunately that’s as far as our Morse tour got (we’ll have to do Brasenose College, the Sheldonian Theatre and the Bear Inn another month). The tour ended at Zizzi, where some friends from Felixstowe, Oxford and Edinburgh convened to get their fill of pasta and chat. Dinner was lovely (it’s always delightful when you introduce your friends and they seem to get on) and I was sad that we had to cut it short - but also for good reason: my birthday treat, a trip to see Derren Brown live!

Seeing Derren Brown live may not really count as a luxury any more, since I’ve now been four times to four different shows. However, I really think his latest show - Enigma - was, as usual, an improvement on the previous tours. I admit that his finale wasn’t as mind-bogglingly unlikely as during An Evening of Wonders (in which ultimately he spent most of the second half standing up seemingly half the audience, several at a time, and telling them all manner of details about their lives, before preceding to prove that he’d known right from the start what every member of the audience was going to do throughout the show), and I admit I’m such a DB geek that I unravelled at least one of his acts, but he has such fun with the whole show that you can’t fail to be standing with a big, silly grin on your face by the end. He also put us into a “trance” that left me feeling so peaceful I’m looking into learning to meditate, and featured at least one performance - an example of an old trick of the fake mediums of yesteryear - that was genuinely and brilliantly baffling. As with all of his shows, there’s a twist at the end that pulls you to your feet by its sheer, silly invention. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I’m going again for the West End run in July. Tickets aren’t yet booked and anyone’s welcome to join us if they let me know by this Friday (22nd).

The evening ended, as it had to, with a discussion in the Three Goats’ Heads that posited that Derren is, variously, brilliant, foolish and literally devilish. Altogether one of my favourite birthdays yet.

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