KEY POINTS:
Well, would you believe it, here I am sitting in a pub in Oxford having a pint with the most famous person in the glittering 800-year-history of the great English university city: Inspector Morse.
Okay, it's not actually Morse I'm drinking with, it's his creator, Colin Dexter, but
the two do have a great deal in common - including a love of pints, single malts and Wagner - as Dexter readily acknowledges.
And, okay, we're not actually having a pint, because Dexter, like Morse towards the end, has diabetes. "I used to like a pint," he says, sipping sadly on a tonic water, "but I don't drink anything now. They've told me not to."
Out of sympathy with his plight I had a coffee, but after he left I supped a quick and a rather unsatisfactory pint of Caffreys in memory of his fictional character, who these days outshines Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, Sir Walter Raleigh and Cecil Rhodes, Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh as Oxford's most famous offspring.
"It's the places associated with Morse people come to see," says Nuala Young - an Oxford City Councillor, no less - who was kind enough to show us around her city. "The Morse tours are always fully booked."
Of course, she acknowledges, tourists do come to see more than just Morse's haunts, but he's the big crowd-puller. "We can always tell where the programme has been seen because people from there start turning up. It's just been shown in Cambodia so we're waiting for our first Cambodian groups to arrive."
That may seem bizarre, given the galaxy of famous names associated with Oxford, but there's proof of Morse's ascendancy in the bar of the Randolph Hotel where I met Dexter.
A small plaque records that this is where in 1880 the Amateur Athletic Association was formed and, in effect, the foundations of modern athletics laid. A much bigger plaque records Morse's comment that "they serve a decent pint" at the Randolph and the house bar is now called the Morse Bar.
It's the same everywhere. Just across the road from the hotel is the Ashmolean Museum, the oldest in Britain, founded with the aid of an eclectic collection of items assembled by Charles I's gardener, where you can find everything from Guy Fawkes' lantern to a magnificent mantle worn by the father of Pocahontas.
The museum is a dazzling place, with some of the dazzle coming from a glittering collection of university plate, including the gold crozier, chalice and plate - the earliest surviving examples of English hallmarked gold - of Bishop Richard Fox who founded Corpus Christi College in 1517.
But the Ashmolean's claim to fame these days is that Morse paid a visit in The Wolvercote Tongue.
Round the corner a brick cross on The Broad marks the spot where 500 years ago Bishops Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer were burned at the stake - the doors of nearby Balliol College still have the scorch marks - and nearby is the spectacular Martyrs Memorial.
All very interesting, but did you know the Martyrs Memorial also appeared in The Wolvercote Tongue?
Just up the road is the old Radcliffe Infirmary where penicillin was developed - the bedpans they grew the mould in are preserved in Oxford's Museum of the History of Science - for more than 200 years a leader in the field of medicine.
Look up the infirmary on-line, however, and Wikipedia gives equal billing to the discovery of penicillin and the fact that "The Woodstock Road entrance of the hospital was frequently seen in the ITV television series Inspector Morse."
Partly, of course, it all goes to show the almost frightening power of the modern celebrity (in this case a fictional one). But it's also because Oxford - old Oxford, the university city - is really a very small place where so much has happened that stories inevitably overlap.
Certainly when we walked round with Nuala Young there was a story for each street corner, shop, pub and alleyway, not to mention every nook and cranny in the colleges themselves.
From the street they look very much like solid buildings, but inside their ornate gateways, guarded by traditionally uniformed porters, and you find delightful quadrangles, perfect lawns, serene chapels, venerable libraries, dining halls lined with portraits, and beautiful gardens, all with the most marvellous links to the great names of history.
Take University College, the oldest, reputed - though not reliably - to have been founded by Alfred the Great in 872.
This is where Bill Clinton inhaled, Bob Hawke, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson studied politics, and Prince Felix Usupov, the assassin of Rasputin, learned the classics.
Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was an undergraduate but was expelled after only a year for setting fire to his study, electrifying his tutor's doorknob and - worst of all - advocating atheism.
When he became famous, however, all was forgiven, and a poignant statue of his drowned body being recovered from the Mediterranean now takes pride of place. As a joker himself, I'm sure his ghost enjoys the fact that it has become a popular prank to paint the statue's genitalia and the regular cleaning means they are now smaller than it used to be.
Or come with us inside Brasenose College with its bizarre carvings of monks picking their noses and vomiting. Above the high table in the dining hall is a brass doorknocker in the shape of a nose from which the college is said to take its name. The story goes that in 1334 this knocker was stolen by rebellious students and taken to Lincolnshire. In 1890 the knocker was discovered on the front door of a house in Lincolnshire and the college bought the property in order to get the knocker back.
Famous sons of Brasenose include William Golding, who wrote Lord of the Flies, Alexander Nowell, who invented bottled beer, and Michael Palin, who is said to have got the inspiration for the famous Monty Python skit on the Ministry of Silly Walks from a philosophy professor with an unusual gait. More importantly, Brasenose College features as Lonsdale College in the Morse stories.
Then there's Lincoln, with a famous statue of an imp above the entrance to the main hall, said to have done much mischief elsewhere in the university city but to have protected its own college from harm. In true university fashion Lincoln also preserves the memory of its least impish son, John Wesley, founder of Methodism, with a bust and a library.
Maybe it was this Methodist connection that kept the booze-loving Morse away from Lincoln but, by way of consolation, Young points out that John Cornwell, alias John le Carre, attended, and apparently based his character George Smiley on a former rector, Vivian Green.
Magdalene College "be sure to pronounce it mawd-lin" - also has some famous ugly statues, gargoyles, around its beautiful brick cloisters. These are said to have inspired CS Lewis, who was a professor there, with the idea of the stone animals in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Among its most famous students are diarist Samuel Pepys and Oscar Wilde, who famously responded to a ban on keeping dogs by getting a pet lobster which he took for walks. But Morse seems to have passed it by.
Oriel College was closed to the public when we turned up, but Young charmed the porter into letting us in and handing over the enormous keys to the dining hall and chapel.
The grand old hall has superb portraits of former students such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Cecil Rhodes and Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster in Tom Brown's Schooldays.
The chapel was simply magical, with its carved pews, superb stained glass windows, the organ playing and the choir singing ... and our guide softly reminds us that this is where Morse came to sing in the choir in The Infernal Serpent.
Ironically, she adds, a real connection with Oriel is provided by Kevin Whateley, alias Morse's sidekick Lewis, whose great-great-grandfather actually did study there, then emigrated to New Zealand where he helped to found Christchurch.
The largest college in Oxford is Christ Church. Behind its stone facade sweeping lawns run down to the river where Lewis Carroll (mathematics lecturer Charles Dodgson) played croquet, got to know young Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean, and her cat, which had a habit of snoozing in a big chestnut tree (which is still there), and wrote Alice In Wonderland.
The grand old college also appears - no, not in Morse - in the Harry Potter movies where its staircase and dining hall feature as Hogwarts.
But perhaps the most important college for lovers of fantasy is Exeter.
This is where both Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials and JR Tolkien, who wrote Lord of the Rings, were undergraduates.
There, too, Young was able to sweet-talk us into the chapel, another magnificent medieval creation, and once again we were lucky enough to enjoy the choir rehearsing. "This," she whispered, "is where Morse came in the last story, The Remorseful Day. He was sitting just over there when he realised who had committed the murder, went outside and sat on a bench, and had a heart attack."
Outside the mist was even thicker, giving the quadrangle and the bench where Morse collapsed an appropriately eerie air, and with the night closing in and the air growing bitterly cold it was time to end our tour.
As a Lord of the Rings enthusiast I thought it only right to round things off with a visit to the Eagle and Child, where Tolkien, his friend CS Lewis and their cronies formed a literary group called The Inklings and discussed their ideas for fantasy novels.
Lewis evidently based his character of Dr Elwin Ransom, the cheerful philologist in Out of the Silent Planet, on his pub-loving friend Tolkien. Tolkien in turn is said to have based the character of Treebeard on the way Lewis boomed even louder than usual after a few pints. And the scene in The Hobbit where Bilbo is rescued by the giant eagles is reckoned to have been inspired by the pub's sign showing a child being carried by a huge bird.
But, as I supped a nice pint of Brakspear and warmed up after the evening chill, it emerged that most of the tourists flocking in here were not fellow Lord of the Rings fans after all.
"This," proclaimed a chap who seemed to be a tour guide, "was a regular watering hole for Colin Dexter ... and we saw Morse drinking here in The Secret of Annexe 3."
Jim Eagles visited the Oxford as guest of Visit Britain and Emirates.
GETTING THERE
Every day Emirates has three flights from Auckland and one from Christchurch to Dubai, and flies from Dubai to several British airports, including Heathrow. For regular fares and frequent specials see www.emirates.com or call 0508 364 728.
WHAT TO DO
The Oxford Tourist Information website is at www.chem.ox.ac.uk/oxfordtour/morses_oxford.
FURTHER INFORMATION
The main website for general information about visiting Britain is www.visitbritain.com.