You either see the point of the drunken, rackety lifestyle chronicled by Christopher Howse in Soho in the Eighties (Bloomsbury, £20) or, more likely, you don’t. If you don’t, it is perhaps unwise, and I would say unfair, to perform the sort of hatchet job such as was done by John Walsh in a Sunday Times review.

Walsh claimed the book offered “a claustrophobic Gehenna of crapulous deadbeats” – a Gehenna being (as my dictionary revealed) where the Israelites sacrificed their children to Moloch, hence hell.

The critic seems strangely preoccupied by incinerated youth, since his final insult is to call Soho in the Eighties “as amusing as a burning orphanage”.

I beg to differ, finding this a valuable memoir, offering a warm and candid account of days very different from ours which, tangentially, I witnessed.

Howse, a respected journalist with the Daily Telegraph, makes no grandiose claims for what is simply a clear-sighted record of what he saw and did earlier in his life.

“My focus,” he writes in the foreword, “is the places where poets, painters [including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon], stagehands, retired prostitutes, criminals, actresses, musicians and general layabouts met to drink and converse, or shout at each other.”

These places were The Coach and Horses, in Greek Street – immortalised by Jeffrey Bernard in his Spectator Low Life column – and the French House and Colony Room Club, in Dean Street.

The gallery of characters includes a number known to me, some not depicted in the happiest way.

This is certainly the case with the actor Bill Simpson, remembered by all of my age as Dr Finlay in the long-running BBC television series.

It was in this role that he met wife-to-be Tracy Reed (formerly married to Edward Fox), who was cast as his girlfriend.

Never so stellar again, Bill was by 1975 playing the ugly sister Dollalolla in the Oxford New Theatre pantomime Cinderella alongside Roy Hudd and Dana. He lodged with my friend Fanny Stein in Leckford Road and there were many convivial evenings around the corner at The Gardener’s Arms.

By 1986, he was slumped drunk in a chair at The Coach and Horses when the cameras rolled on a BBC Arena programme about Jeffrey Bernard. When it aired he was dead, at 54.

A couple of pages before telling us this, Howse introduces publisher Stephen Pickles, “the most regular of regulars” at ‘the Coach’.

‘Pickles’, as he has always liked to be called, was a figure in Oxford in the 1970s, a pal of Magdalen man Alan Hollinghurst whose latest novel The Sparsholt Affair (a stinker) is dedicated to him.

Pickles dabbled in theatricals here, directing a production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters that the writer A.N. Wilson thought the best he has seen. It starred Exeter student Imogen Stubbs as Irina, her stage debut.

Another Chekhov play, The Seagull, brought John Hurt to Oxford Playhouse, in 1985. He played Trigorin, under Charles Sturridge, the director of Granada’s Brideshead Revisited.

His legendary capacity for booze was evident when his and my friend Bruce Purchase (he’d been at Rada with John) suggested a post-show dinner at Browns. Hurt’s opening order was half a dozen bottles of Veuve Clicquot.

The actor was later to play the title role in a radio production of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, Keith Waterhouse’s West End hit play starring Peter O’Toole.

He had ample chance to make a study from life in the Coach, where he was regularly seen blotto. On one occasion, he was pulled to safety by regulars as he made an attempt to jump from the counter into the bottle- and glass-laden back fitting.

Soho in the Eighties is not a book packed with funny stories. Howse perhaps took his cue from Bernard who often declared that “Anecdote is not a form of conversation” and snubbed the Oxfordshire-based actor Freddie Jones in the Coach when he tried to tell him one.

Another regular, Christoph Schliack (aka the Red Baron) once asked him: “Do you know what Randolph Churchill said when he first read the Bible?” “No, and I don’t want to know,” J.B. replied.

Maybe not, but Howse should have told his readers, because it’s very funny: “God, isn’t God a s**t!”

WHAT might be thought Oxford’s equivalent 40 years ago of the proximate trio of Soho drinking establishments I discuss above?

My nominations – because I used them and saw who else did – would be a number of boozers in and around Jericho.

The principal one was not in fact a boozer at all, but a basement restaurant with a bar above.

This was The Bistro, owner Mrs Rhoda Vaughan, in Walton Street premises later transformed into Raoul’s, in which guise it has served the city’s drinkers for decades since.

Our set, composed of students and young professionals, were there most nights in the bar over a period of two or three years.

In the group were a number of young women destined to make a name in various fields, not that we could have guessed it then.

These were television-presenter-to-be Paula Yates, then a prototype punk; novelist and critic Cressida Connolly (who gave me her father Cyril’s grey fedora); ‘lookalike’ artist Alison Jackson; and pottery-maker Emma Bridgewater.

Mrs Vaughan, whose parents had run The Eagle and Child in St Giles (with a rank of hansom cabs in front of it), entertained many older customers. These included David Norrington, who hired some of our set to work in his summer language schools at Hertford and Wadham, and the caterer John Stott whose actress sister Judith was married to the comedian Dave Allen.

Among the pubs we patronised was The Rose and Crown, in North Parade Avenue – then as now a fusion of city and academic life. One of its liveliest customers was the elderly divine, Canon John Kelly, the Principal of St Edmund Hall.

The Victoria, in Walton Street, was also popular, with The Walton Ale Stores opposite if you felt like slumming it. This was demolished years ago, along with another spit and sawdust establishment in the street, The Prince of Wales, now rebuilt as Jude the Obscure.

THE speed of some trains on the Chiltern Railways route between Oxford and Marylebone has slightly unnerved me on more than one recent journey to the capital.

Though no more than 100mph is achieved, I believe, rather than the 125mph of some sections of the Great Western Railway route, the perception is of travelling faster.

My worst experience lately came on a mid-afternoon service to Marylebone, which was scheduled to run non-stop after Bicester Village (where, as usual, we picked up hordes of shoppers with their malodorous takeaway food).

Unusually, a woman driver was at the controls. Was she out to prove she could go just as fast as the men?

The rollings and rattlings we encountered as we hurtled to London led Rosemarie and me (and for all I know our noshing neighbours) to wish the pace would slacken slightly.

Near Haddenham and Thame Parkway there was a tremendous lurch that made it feel as if we were about to leave the tracks.

On the way back, at around the same spot, our train slowed to a sedate pace. In explanation of this we were told via the intercom that the driver of an earlier train had reported some sort of problem with the track, making necessary our cautionary speed.

This seemed to us a curious coincidence, considering what happened on the outward run. I realise, of course, that we would have been on different rails. But might some sort of subsidence be affecting a wider patch of the trackbed?

I am curious to know whether any of my readers has thoughts on the matter, or indeed has experienced anything similar.

No doubt some will think that I am scaremongering. But over such matters you can’t be too careful.