What befalls

Regular visitors here will know that if you want to find me, a posh hotel is not the best place to start looking. In my 22 years in Oxford, I have set foot in Inspector Morse’s Randolph only once, when I couldn’t summon up the courage to argue with an acquaintance who wanted us to have a cup of tea there. (For the record, it was no better than a cup of tea anywhere else and, at pence per drop, was considerably worse value.) But when my colleague, Gez, showed me news pictures this evening of smoke billowing out of its roof and I realised why I’d seen a helicopter hovering overhead earlier I thought I’d go into reportage mode.

A few wedding dresses for tomorrow will doubtless smell damply of smoke but no-one was hurt. Even so, all around the Ashmolean Museum (the building in the foreground) just beyond the police cordon are phalanxes of ambulances in case they are needed by any of the firefighters who will spend the night damping down the embers.

The fire meant that Gez himself was pushed down the local news agenda. Today was the opening of the garden he designed and created with trainees from our place of work, previously blipped in progress here.