Italian language course: The punter's guide to Oxbridge

Picnics, parasols and gentle inebriation — could there be a more glorious way to while away a summer’s day, asks Chris Haslam

Is there any more quintessential English summertime experience — apart from losing the World Cup and being stuck behind a caravan — than going for a lazy punt along Albion’s limpid rivers? Does anything evoke poetic cliché quite as effortlessly as gliding gracefully through England’s green and pleasant land, towards Grantchester, where stands the church clock at ten to three and where there’s honey still for tea? Doesn’t the very mention of a punting trip suggest pretty girls in summer frocks, exquisite picnics in wicker baskets and man’s noble struggle with the most impractical, obstreperous river craft ever invented?

Conceived on the Thames, adopted by the Fens and accepted by both Oxford and Cambridge as the smart way to travel, the humble punt was all the rage at the turn of the century, and these days, unless you’re splitting the atom or discovering DNA, punting is still pretty much the best way to spend your time in either city.

In Cambridge, the obvious choice is to set off from the Mill Pond, for what would seem to be a perfectly sensible punt past the architectural splendours of the Backs.

This, however, would be a stupid punt, for on sunny summer days this stretch of the Cam resembles something between the Styx and the Mekong Delta circa 1974, with boatloads of inept Japanese tourists, hysterical Italian language course -school students and shaven-headed Engerlanders battling it out, beam-to-beam, beneath the spires of King’s College chapel. The end of a punt is known as a huff and the bit beneath is known as the swim — try to navigate the Backs and you’ll find out why.

In Cambridge, all the best people go the other way: far from the madding crowds, towards the pastoral serenity of Grantchester Meadows. Scudamore’s has been renting punts on the Cam since 1910 and “those in the know,” says manager Rod Ingersent, “have always gone upstream”.

Punting reached its peak in popularity in the years before the first world war, by which time the rival university cities had developed their own distinctive styles. While Oxonians poled from within the punt, Cambridge punted from the deck, a practice reputed to have been initiated by the saucy ladies of Girton College in order to show off their shapely ankles. Risqué then, it’s risky now as you try to balance on a narrow platform that’s slippery when wet and just inches above the water.

Experienced punters hang 10 from one side, tilting the punt to create a keel and thus ply a straighter course, but beginners, says Rod, are best off playing safe. He hands me a 16ft spruce pole with a twin-tined spike on the business end. Aluminium has largely replaced wood, but we all know what’s best. “Let the pole slip through your hands until it touches the bottom, then thrust away,” he advises. “Give it a little twist before pulling it out and steer by swinging the pole like a rudder. One more thing,” he adds, looking at me like I’m the man most likely, “if it sticks in the mud, don’t hold on.”

Sound advice, but what Rod doesn’t know is that I’m no novice. I courted my wife on the Cam and I’m in full agreement with Dorothy L Sayers’s assertion that: “It is better to punt than to be punted, and a desire to have fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.”

First fun on the Grantchester stretch is to be had at the Crusoe Bridge, a footbridge linking Sheep’s Green and Coe Fen. Lesser punters will duck beneath the low steel span, but the real challenge is to climb up and over, dropping back into your punt as it passes beneath. Get it wrong and you get wet, but you’ve one more chance to master the ancient art of bridge-hopping at the Coe Fen bridge, where grimy urchins from the Arbury Estate sometimes gather to hamper your attempt. Moor up nearby to drip-dry and they could also make an attempt on your hamper, so it’s best to keep going.

From here you enter the gentle Cambridgeshire countryside, poling past fields of intelligent-looking cows and the dreadlocked fronds of weeping willows. Electric-blue damselflies zoom across the green water, while ugly ducklings paddle out of your path, their hissing and sighing echoing the smug superiority of the undergraduates employed as chauffeurs by those too lazy, or too American, to pole their own punts.

At the site of the old open-air pool the river bed is paved, but elsewhere the mud sucks at the pole, trying to drag you down like a malevolent mermaid. By now you are far from the colleges and the punt will exploit little-known laws of physics to make sudden changes of direction, swinging wildly towards bramble patches on the banks or making minute course adjustments to bring overhanging branches sweeping over the heads of your passengers and into contact with your backside as you bend to drag the pole from its bed.

The trick is to remain calm, retain your sense of humour and above all to impress upon your companions that you are entirely in control. Their obligations, in return, are to offer useless advice and feeble nautical jokes and to make the champagne go further by drinking it while you’re punting.

Your reward comes at Grantchester Meadows, where you could lunch on deckchairs at the gorgeous Orchard Tea Garden, but you really should lay out the blankets and a picnic. And, by long-standing tradition, that picnic can only come from the famous Cambridge bakery Fitzbillies. The secret is to call proprietor Penny Thomson, tell her how many are in your party and let her do the rest. A squadron of Spitfires roared overhead as I sprawled in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree, feasting on gourmet sandwiches, exquisite patisserie and Fitzbillies’ world-famous chelsea buns, and sipping chilled champagne from glass flutes. Except the champagne was all gone.

Oxford offers the punter an altogether different experience. Whereas the upper reaches of the Cam are awash with the likes of Michael Portillo and Jeffrey Archer, as well as the sort of people you see on stage at the Nobel prize ceremony, the Cherwell attracts an altogether more laid-back crowd. Of course, if you follow the tourist trail to Magdalen Bridge and the River Isis, you’ll meet the same language students, Japanese tourists and lagered-up yobs you last encountered on the Cam, but head out of the city to the delightful Cherwell Boathouse, where Roger Forster rents punts for £14 an hour, and all is peace and tranquillity.

“There’s no prior booking, no time limit and rarely more than an hour’s wait,” says Roger. “Upstream will take you to the pub,” — a sign warns customers that punts abandoned at the boozer will incur a hefty recovery fee — “and downstream will take you to Parsons Pleasure,” a patch of the university parks once favoured by Oxford dons as a nude sunbathing spot. Legend recalls how a number of naked academics were once caught napping by a puntload of passing ladies. As the dons hastened to cover their poles, one of the assembly chose instead to hide his countenance, explaining to his colleagues that: "In this town, gentlemen, I am known by my face.”

While the Isis in Oxford city centre is a nightmare of mass tourism, the upstream stretch of the Cherwell as far as the Victoria Arms is dreamily bucolic. Picnics can be ordered from Taylors Deli in St Giles, but my advice is to eschew the riverine dining and eat early instead at the splendid Cherwell Boathouse. This airy riverside restaurant, next-door to the boathouse, offers dinner for £24.50 — maybe grilled devilled herring on toast, a main of rump beef, and cherry soup with dandelion-and-burdock cream for dessert. The wine list offers magnums of Bollinger for £150, and if you split that between the five friends who stiffed you on the Cam, it’ll cost them just £30 each to make proper amends.