A former royal refuge; the place where fun goes to die; home of the port-drinking keepers of the space-time continuum.
 
How then, one would naturally wonder, did it come about that Tatler described the Merton Winter Ball as transforming the College from a "cloister of dignity and learning into a scene of riotous revelry"? Surely, you ask, they don’t have fun at Merton? And how could the Ball be so popular that ‘ladders were put on the College walls by hopeful gate-crashers’? 
 
But Tatler were not mistaken- Merton’s triennial Winter Ball is the event in everyone's Oxmas calendar, and no wonder: this is Oxford’s only white tie Winter Ball, in Oxford’s oldest college.