Oxford and Alice in Wonderland

Down St Aldate's hurried a little man in a bowler hat, his black overcoat flapping in his wake. As he bustled along he took a watch from his waistcoat pocket and, having glanced at it, hurried even more.

Curiouser and curiouser. He reminded us of someone. Or he would have done, if he had been a rabbit, rather than a bulldog.

For we were in Oxford on the trail of Alice in Wonderland, and were very susceptible to flights of fancy. It was my fault of course. I had told the children that there had been a real Alice, and that we could visit her old home, and go on the trip up the river on which the story if her adventures in wonderland was first told.

All we had to do was follow the man in the hat, who was a bulldog, or guard, and he would lead us to Alice's old home, Christ Church College.

This is going to be Alice's year. January 14 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of her friend/biographer/creator - call him what you will - Charles Dodgson, who wrote her adventures under the pen name of Lewis Carroll.. There will be special celebrations. And there can be no better time to follow in the footsteps of Dodgson, his friend Canon Robin Duckworth, and the three daughters of Henry Liddell, the dean of the college, Ina 10, Alice 7 and Edith 5.

They took a picnic from the college on the blazingly hot afternoon of July 4, 1862, down to Folley Bridge were they hired a rowing boat from Salters boatyard and rowed three miles upstream for a picnic near Godstow Lock.

On the way, Alice got bored and begged for a story. It began: "Alice was beginning to get very tired sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do..." and children have been entranced by it ever since.

I had half suspected that the college authorities would be rather snooty about their Alice connection. Christ Church is, after all, the largest, grandest and quite possibly the proudest of the Oxford colleges. But not a bit of it. As we shuffled round the guides were eager to point out each little Alice landmark to the children.

In the great Hall, as we stood, dwarfed beneath the high hammerbeam roof like a group who had unwisely swigged from a bottle labelled 'drink me' and shrunk to a fraction of our normal size, we had pointed out to us the Alice window high up on the south wall.

This is a magnificently imposing and intimidating dining room, panelled in oak and with the portraits of renowned Christ Church men gazing loftily down. Indeed, the only mundane thing about it are the little stainless steel salt and pepper pots set at intervals down the long forms.To be in keeping with their surroundings they would need to be at least a foot tall, rich in gothic decoration and wielded by flunkies who might be called the Shaker of the Salt and the Grinder of the Pepper.

Charles Dodgson has his portrait here - on the right just inside the door - as do Cardinal Wolsey, who founded the college in 1525, six of the 13 Prime Ministers including Gladstone and Eden who were educated here, William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, John Wesley, John Locke and WH Auden.

Dodgson looks like a rather glum Duke of Windsor. Glum, perhaps, because he seems to have acquired Michael Aspel's hair.

On the opposite side of the cloister to the Hall is the cathedral, which is built on an altogether different scale. Here, you feel as if you have eaten a cake marked 'eat me' and soared to several times your usual height. But the guide book reassures you that you are infact in one of the smallest Anglican cathedrals in England. It is full of treasures. A charming elderly lady steward grabbed the children and showed them Alice's sister. Edward Burn-Jones used Edith Liddell as his model for the central figure of St Catherine of Alexandria for the St Catherine Window which is in the Lucy Chapel to the right of the chancel.

Outside, as we entered Tom Quad, we bumped into our bulldog, who was no longer in a hurry, and took time to show us the memorial to the fallen of the first world war. Towards the bottom of the second column of names was Leopold Reginald Hargreaves. And Alice, he told us, grew up to be Mrs Hargreaves.

It was altogether too sombre a piece of information for us on our Alice day. And as the only other Alice landmarks - her home, which is still the private quarters of the Dean, and Dodgson's rooms, which are now the Graduate Common Room, were out of bounds - we headed off down to the river.

We had the energy for walking, but not for rowing, so crossed Folley Bridge and turned right to follow the Thames path up-stream, passing the pleasure boats laid up for winter, their bench seats piled up on deck.

Two canoeists scattered the ducks on a river that was brimming and clay grey, and a sparrowhawk tumbled on the wind like an escaped black bin liner. There were slivers of ice on the towpath puddles, but the sky was clear and the sun bright.

As we walked we swapped remembered snippets of Alice, of the Hatter and the Cheshire cat,
and we annoyed Fred, who had a cold, by reciting every time he snuffled:

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes;
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.

At Osney Lock, where a man in the blue jersey of the Thames Conservancy sipped from a mug of coffee, untroubled by any passing boats, the river curves around the outskirts of town, corralled between allotments and back gardens.

Then, as the houses are left behind, it becomes a watery avenue flanked by pollarded willows before emerging on the wide-open, waterlogged expanse of Port Meadow. We stopped for lunch at a pub called the Perch before rejoining the river and making for Godstow Lock.

It was here that Alice was sitting in the shadow of a haystack, and thinking about making a daisy chain, when the white rabit ran past, muttering about being late and Alice followed him down his hole, into an amazing adventure.

We sat - carefully checking first for rabbit holes - beneath the walls of the ruined Nunnery that stands in the meadow just beyond the lock and was a substantial Benedictine monastery before Henry VIII had a bash at it.

And I realised that I am actually in my third age of Alice. The first was reading about her myself as a child. The second came when, as a student and intrigued by an Alice-inspired pop song in which Grace Slick wailed on about magic mushrooms, I re-read it and thought 'phew, what was that guy on? And where can I get myself some??' The third comes when your own children discover the book, and is the best of all.

After all, Dodgson ends Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with her sister imagining Alice as a grown woman, "and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale,perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland."

It is good to know that the magic still works.