Over the years, the city of Oxford has made a vast contribution to British satire: Jonathan Swift, Richard Ingrams, Alan Bennett, Esther Rantzen. Now add to that exalted list the name of Mick, an old geezer who does the running commentary on one of the city's many open-topped tour buses.

We pass the Said Business School. "It's devoted to making money without working for it," spits Mick as we chug from the train station towards the idyll of the Oxford Canal. "Mr Said is an international arms dealer, by the way."

Now he waves dismissively at one of the many colleges scattered about the city centre. "They teach the students Social Studies in there," he informs us. "What is Social Studies, I hear you ask? Well, I'll tell you. It's training people how to spend other people's money."

Nothing is safe from the savagery. "See this dual carriageway we're on? Demolished a whole swath of the old town to build it. Town planners, eh? Everything they work on ends up worse. Did they go to university to learn how to do that?

"And they're thinking of turning the old jail into a hotel! I can't see it. Your room is the former condemned cell, sir. Pleasant dreams. Would the US turn Alcatraz into a holiday resort? Come to sunny Alcatraz! Miles of sandy beaches, shark fishing..."

This gloriously chippy patter is delivered in the easy-on-the-ear pint-and-a-pie club style, so I stay on the bus for a full circuit - along the High Street, over the Magdalen Bridge, up through the leafy University Parks, and around the student quarter - in order to listen and learn.

I have soon been frothed up into a state of indignation, not least because I forget to disembark at the stop I initially got on at, and am forced to hear the intricacies of the 1986 Al Yamamah arms deal for a second time. I hop off. Mick deserves the chance to stand up, take a bow, and exit the stage to thunderous applause but, as he's pointed out once or twice, there's no justice; the bus keeps looping round on its picturesque circuit, and so must our righteous hero.

Within minutes, I have accidentally stumbled across another hotbed of class warfare, this time at the Bodleian Library. The guide is an intellectual type with many a fascinating story to tell - providing stuccoed porticoes and the late-English perpendicular style rock your world. He informs me in a series of haughty sniffs that yes, of course I can take my bag into the reading rooms. I traipse up the stairs. Enter the security guard:

"Give me that bag."
"But the guide told me..."
"You can't take it up there. Give it to me."
"But the guide..."
"It's NOT HIS PLACE to tell you ANYTHING!!!"

This, I conclude, is the perfect metaphor for the time-honoured battle between pragmatism and idealism, art and science, town and gown. Either that or it's a sign that the guard does not care for the cut of the guide's jib.

At the top of the stairs it becomes apparent that the book-ordering system works on exactly the same principle that Co-op cashiers used years ago to send their till floats off to the cash office upstairs. You fill out a scrap of paper, pop it in a little container, and stuff it in a tube which vacuums it away out of sight. Now, I know I should have been more impressed with the Gothic architecture and the seven million dusty tomes than a contraption I last saw in a supermarket circa 1978, but hey, I'm simple folk.

Which is a point later hammered home in the similarly impressive Norrington Room of the famous Blackwell's bookstore on Broad Street. This shop floor, located under Trinity College, is almost as impressive as the Bodleian, in its own commercial way. It contains 160,000 volumes on three miles of shelving and is in the Guinness Book of Records for having the largest display of books for sale in one room in the world. As I found to my cost, however, the staff prefer to deal with academics:

Me: Do you have a sport section?
Man behind desk (with a look of genuine bemusement): Sport? Er ... what do you mean?
Me: You know, football, tennis, that kind of thing.
Man behind desk: Oh ... I don't know ... um ... eh ... have you tried by the children's books?

This supercilious bastard would no doubt argue that The Oxford Story, a multimedia kiddies' visitor attraction just down the road, is more on my level. Sitting at a moving desk which travels at over one-hundredth-of-a-mile per hour, The Oxford Story takes you on a visceral white-knuckle trundle through 900 years of university history narrated by Magnus Magnusson. It is nearly as exciting as it sounds.

In other words, if you're in Oxford and the kids are playing up, take them to Christ Church College instead and let them see the dining hall where Harry Potter was filmed. (Actually, you'll be letting them see the dining hall where Harry Potter was not filmed; they built a facsimile of this grand portrait-lined refectory in a hanger in Kent. But none of the many excited children wandering about the hall seemed to either know or care. Eyes like plates, they had.)

The rest of my time in Oxford was set aside for idle pursuits and comfortable pleasures.

I reclined on a punt down by the beautiful and highly relaxing Botanic Gardens, necking fizzy booze and listening to the punter talk of his hopes for Oxford United ahead of the new season.

This was followed by digestion of the papers with a pint of organic ale in the garden of the Turf Tavern, a cosy little pub tucked down a foot-wide alley near the Bodleian.

Next on the agenda was swilling refreshing gin and tonics at the Playhouse before a performance of Amajuba, a story of hell and hope in South Africa performed by five stunningly talented dancers and singers.

I washed down an Elvis-would-have-been-jealous cheeseburger with a glass of red in the modern but happily unpretentious Quod restaurant and finally succumbed to sleep, plastered but content, in the adjoining splendour of the Old Bank Hotel.

Eh, you what? Well, you didn't really expect me to go round any more of the colleges, did you?

· Scott Murray stayed at The Old Bank Hotel and travelled on Thames Trains.

For more information see Oxford Tourism