There is a moment. It came last night as I rather knew it would. We drove into Oxford at around seven and the lights strung across the road down the High, in Cornmarket and St Aldate`s were sparkling -all white snowflake-shapes. Shop windows were Aladdin`s caves of richly coloured bright good things. We were allowed a special parking place in Tom Quad, at Christ Church, one of Oxford`s most magnificent - and historic- spaces, and Tom Tower was illuminated and the porters there still wear bowler hats.

On and into the Cathedral, which was filling up and in which I spotted a lot of old friends from our Oxford days, people with whom we had stood at the school gates at coming-home time on many and many a day, people who had taught the girls when they were 3 and 5 and 9 and supported us through the years of our second baby dying and the third, now the 21 year old YD, being triumphantly born. People who mean a lot to us.

I was there for the third December running to read at the Advent concert in aid of Emmaus - a charity for the homeless. Each Emmaus house aims to be self-supporting - people live there and work there, restoring ,repairing and re-selling furniture and electrical goods; as they say, Emmaus gives them a bed and a reason to get out of it every morning. They earn and save and it is hoped, eventually join, or re-join mainstream society. Oxford has not yet built its Emmaus house and needs another half million pounds though one and a half million have been raised so far.

The concert is always beautiful. Christ Church Cathedral Choir is superb and last night sang a mixture of old and new music, from Mozart and Lennox Berkeley to Howard Goodall ( of The Snowman and Walking in the Air fame.) The congregation sang the best advent hymn, O Come, O Come Emmanuel, with all those difficult line-joins, and we ended, of course, with O Come all Ye Faithful. Post-bronchitis my voice sort of vanished in mid-line here and there - one minute a sound was coming out, however tuneless, the next, silence and mouthed words. But it held out for me to read. Last year other readers included Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan Police Chief and a Fellow of Christ Church. This year, my fellow readers were Emily Watson (Hermione of the Harry Potter films) Sir Roger Bannister, he of the 4 minute mile, Robert Hardy, who I first remember playing Hotspur on television in the Age of Kings series 50 years ago- years later, he was known for the senior veterinary partner in All Creatures Great and Small. The other reader was Alexander Masters, who also read last year and who has a special link with Emmaus because the subject of his wonderful book Stuart. A Life Backwards, was an Emmaus house dweller. The organiser always gives me two things to read, one of which is extremely testing, the other much easier. Last night`s test was a prose passage about the nature of Angels, by John Donne and fiendish it was too. You try reading that, including Latin sentences, from the pulpit in a Cathedral. My nerves are good for that sort of thing though and the second reading was lovely - Laurie Lee on the birth of his daughter and how after it the meaning of Christmas came home to him for the first time.

We repaired for drinks and smoked salmon sandwiches to the great dining hall - but Alexander and I to sit outside it, being fed and watered while we signed and sold our books to add to the Emmaus Oxford appeal.

We drove through late-night Oxford, with  the usual kebab and burger vans on the street corners, probably recycling the same kebabs and burgers they had when we lived there. Students on bicycles going home late to colleges. No drunks. Has Oxford changed ?

It was a dark and stormy night through which we drove home to the country. The dogs escaped into a howling vastness as we opened the door and two garden benches blew over. We were hungry. Smoked salmon sandwiches are only sustaining in the short term. They also make you thirsty. So I went to bed with a cup of tea, a bowl of porridge and cream and, instead of my novel, St Luke`s Gospel. Christmas is just round the corner.