Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, has just bought an Oxford pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis drank.

And so have I.

There are a few minor differences. Ellison, founder of software company Oracle, paid £8m for the Eagle and Child pub. I bought the pub across the road, the Lamb and Flag, for £1,000. Oh, and Ellison owns the pub outright. I’m just one of hundreds of investors in the Lamb and  Flag.

Rachel Reeves may have hammered every landlord in the country in her Budgets, with crippling business and National Insurance rates. But, still, Larry and I have embraced the same wildly optimistic dream: of drinking in a pub you own – or part-own.

When the Lamb and Flag closed down a few years ago, a group of old undergraduates who used to drink there clubbed together to buy it, so I now have the smug pleasure of telling my old university friends. “I’ve just bought our favourite pub.” Their jaws drop. Where on earth did I – an impoverished hack – get the money?

In fact, I only paid that £1,000 towards the cost of buying a 15-year lease of the ancient pub on St Giles’, Oxford, founded in 1613 (the Eagle and Child opened for business shortly after, in 1650). I’m one of more than 300 investors, a mixture of locals and Oxford graduates, who grouped together to buy their adored old local after it tragically closed in January 2021, thanks to Covid. Many of them paid much more than that minimum £1,000 contribution

We’re called ‘the Inklings’ – borrowing the name of the writers’ group, including Lewis and Tolkien, who used to chat about their books in Oxford pubs from the early 1930s until 1949.

Lewis and Tolkien started off drinking in the Eagle and Child (or “the Bird and Baby”, as they called it) across the road. But, outraged by the landlady installing a dartboard, they migrated to the Lamb and Flag.

And so, after going dark for 21 months, the Lamb and Flag reopened – under new, delighted ownership.

I first went there when I was at university 30 years ago - and it's a joy going back there, though I now drink in a different way. There are no more cries of “Down in one!”. No more eight pints an evening. These days, I have the patience – and sobriety – to notice the pub’s early 17th century fireplace and the Georgian bar.

Middle-aged drinking is, funnily enough, more enjoyable than the frantic drinking of my late teens and early 20s. Rather than drink in search of oblivion, I can now really taste the beer, all supplied by local breweries. On my return to the Lamb and Flag soon after it opened, I restricted myself to three pints of Jeremy Clarkson’s Hawkstone lager, from ingredients grown at his Diddly Squat farm in Chipping Norton, only 20 miles north-west from where I was sitting, in the pub’s back room.

When I first returned, I met an old university friend, now living back in Oxford, for a drink. The years peeled away: but for my growing waistline and retreating hairline, nothing much had changed. We laughed as we remembered some old friends fondly – and some enemies not so fondly.

What a great thrill it was to drink in my own boozer, too! I’m afraid I couldn’t resist a little burst of smugness at asking my friend to meet in our favourite pub – and drop in the fact that I now owned it. Well, a very small part of it.

That little chunk of ownership has made me love it even more – and find out things I never knew about the pub when I sat there, semi-comatose, three decades ago. What a history the pub has, even beyond Lewis and Tolkien. In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Arabella, Jude’s first wife, works as a barmaid at the Lamb and Flag. Undergraduates Graham Greene and Tony Blair – and Inspector Morse - often dropped in for a pint at the pub (it is next to St John’s College, which still owns the freehold).

It seems extraordinary that such an historically important pub could close; then again, it was only following a sad trend across the country: since 2000, 13,000 pubs – a quarter of all the pubs in the UK – have called last orders for the final time.

How lovely that the Lamb and Flag has opened again, and that it’s living a new kind of life. Visitors will now get a real feel for being at Oxford without being at the university, thanks to pub events, open to all, that include talks by politicians, scientists and Oxford dons.

Recent events include a joint talk by George Osborne and Ed Balls, both former Chancellors of the Exchequer and Oxford graduates, while earlier this year, Giles Coren, another Inkling, was a judge in a Humans vs AI poetry competition – the human poets beat the artificial ones hands down, thank God.

Too often, Oxford is divided into Town and Gown. The Lamb and Flag has always been a mixture of both and continues to be so. “Some of the biggest supporters of the pub didn’t go to Oxford,” says Kate O’Brien, Chairman of the Inklings Group. “There are Inklings from Australia and America who’ve contributed.”