My Life in Books

Not being quite famous enough to be invited to talk to Ann Robinson about 'My Life in Books' in the BBC series, you thank heavens for small mercies and then immediately want to have a go.

The format begins with the guests divulging their favourite reading from childhood. There is only really one candidate for me, and Richmal Crompton's Just William is the obvious answer. William's misunderstood good intentions, ill-conceived plans for enterprise and adventure and their inevitably disastrous denouements provided 30-odd book full of stories that boil down to half a dozen basic plots at most. But, in the meantime, there is the succession of his sister's hopelessly besotted boyfriends, the distant father, a series of do-gooding or intellectual eccentrics in the village and the delusions of grandeur and leadership in William himself and not quite as much of Violet Elizabeth Bott as television might lead you to think.

Declaring an adolescent interest, I now realize I need my teenage years back to read all the classic titles that I've missed because I spent that time reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn, not just One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which doesn't take long, but long evenings went by with three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward, The First Circle, August 1914, Lenin in Zurich and the most accessible, perhaps, the Short Stories and Prose Poems, which is the one I'll nominate here because it's the one I remember best. It gave me some insight into C20th Russian history reading Solzhenitsyn but it was a mis-spent youth.

I haven't seen enough of the BBC shows to know if poetry's allowed. If it is, I will have to have Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains, the volume in which he moves from metrical to syllabic verse and opens out towards a more humane view because his poems have been my main literary interest since discovering him aged about 16 or 17. If poetry isn't allowable in this game, I'll take James Joyce The Dubliners, the greatest prose fiction writer, in his masterpiece of understatement, inertia and linguistic style.

Whereas my favourite book, which made me laugh out loud on a train, in bed and anywhere else I opened it, is Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper, a memoir of childhood Catholicism, adult Marxism, literary academics and class. It is the old renegade in top stand-up comic form with some marvellously told set piece stories, not the least of which is about a trip he makes to Scotland to attend the funeral of one of his undergraduate students. He is picked up from the station by a Lady Dotty and driven to the ancestral home where,

A policeman at the gates drew himself to attention and saluted as we passed. Either he had recognized Lady Dotty or he was a fan of literary theory.

The programme ends with the guest admitting to a 'guilty pleasure', which I find quite difficult to think of. I'm not sure if Banana Yoshimoto's novels of Japanese poignant loss and deep friendship are chick-lit or proper literature and even when asking at dinner at an academic conference from someone who presumably knew, my query wasn't even deemed worthy of an answer.

So, not knowing if that's guilty or not, I'll have to go with Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters. It was a different age when an ingenious child, called Fatty, could undertake his investigations in a quiet village in a range of masterly disguises. The five find-outers obviously outwit the fall guy constable, Mr. Goon, every time and although there are a number of very tempting titles in the series, like The Mystery of...The Invisible Thief, Banshee Towers or The Disappearing Cat, as soon as you've read Spiteful Letters, you know it's the best.

My Afternoons with Margueritte

My Afternoons with Margueritte (La Tete en Frise), Dir. Jean Becker. Gerard Depardieu.

In Portsmouth we don't necessarily get the latest French films immediately on their release here but the no.6 cinema in the dockyard provides a fine service in bringing them to us in due course and we are grateful for that.

It is a venue that deserves support and I am unstinting in my continuing patronage of it by turning up at least once a year.

Depardieu has had his moments of controversy, in recent years wearing an ear piece on stage to save him learning his lines or offering the opinion that Juliette Binoche has achieved more success than her talent warranted. He perhaps doesn't suffer fools gladly but on film he has a ravishing charm and charisma- and there's considerably more of him than there used to be- that keeps me at least on vague acquaintance with the interior of a cinema.

In this gentle comedy he is Germain, uneducated and barely literate, the butt of bar room humour among his drinking friends, who has names for the pigeons in the park where he immediately, as we join his story, meets Margueritte, a 95 year old lady who introduces him to the pleasures of reading, beginning with the reasonably highbrow text of La Peste by Albert Camus.

It is perhaps a bit unlikely. Not only that two such characters should make such devoted friends but that the village idiot should have a girlfriend, played by Maurane, that you suspect might be too good for him. But it is not social realism and much of the humour translated well enough, beginning with a joke on the Guide Michelin and Guide Maupassant, which is beyond Germain and his struggle to make proper use of a dictionary.

But in the best tradition of French film, it leads us to reflect on love and its various possibilities. There will be those who will say it's a sentimental old tale of little import and they are welcome to their point of view but with it's shabby deshabillement (if there is such a word), and the parts of his mother, wayward when young and crazy in old age, it is simply 'feel good' in a way that doesn't require intellectual analysis. Germain does the right thing by the old lady that he loves in a very real way, and there's a happy future immediately ahead of the main characters in an ending which brings it all together neatly and without stretching it out or dwelling on it.

I got my money's worth by being moved despite myself, which is what Depardieu consistently does for me, my favourite actor in a class of his own.

David Harsent - Night

David Harsent, Night (Faber)

After Don Paterson's Rain and Muldoon's Maggot on a theme of decay and Sean O'Brien's November forthcoming, David Harsent's Night has another of this generation of poets providing dark poems for our dark times. It is O'Brien, in The Drowned Book, that he most resembles here in these poems of nightmare underworlds, often dark and usually when it's raining, that describe a limbo, a purgatory existence.
There are memories but there's no specific destination in the wanderings or situations of the characters here and they are either sustained or ruined -hard to say which- by alcohol, which is most often gin. But this discomfiture is something we are becoming accustomed to and it is portrayed almost relentlessly here in a long poem of 721 lines, Elsewhere, a long night's journey of strange encounters impressive for its insistence and shifting rhyme scheme.

Ghosts is an early highlight, who 'bring/a dew of death that settles on picture frames,/on pelmets, on clothes in the closet, on books...' from their other world with its 'undrinkable rivers, its scrubland of snarls and hooks..'. Immaculately imagined, the poem is a simple construction made discursive by the listing technique of these phrases, a distended form of sentence that often includes that sort of hendiadys doubling of 'fun and games' and 'snarls and hooks' and a use of familiar phrases, like the ending here on,
bearing a look
of matchless sorrow as would, for sure,
stop the heart of whoever it is they take you for.

The Hut in Question deliberately seeks out the hut in which Edward Thomas sheltered and experienced so much rain; The Death of Cain is 'from the Cornish, 1611' and uses his example of a cursed outsider and Necrophilia seems to find advantages in 'nothing of jealousy, no risk of bliss,/the wide, white eye; the perfect parting kiss'. The subject matter is carefully selected to fit the themes of desolation, loss and limbo.
The title poem in ten sections is a sleepless night of meditation on horror and anxieties, some bitterness from a broken relationship, the 'gulp and lurch of apnoea' and a catalogue of fears. Nothing like the catalogue of Elsewhere, though, an encyclopedia of night-time underworld that turns out to be what the earlier shorter poems were only building towards, a journey (to take just a short sample from one list),
past walk-up and rack-rent,
past casinos and clubs and shebeens, past Mr. Moon's
Tattoo Shack, past day-for-night hotels, past cash-
on-the-nail, past rat-runs and bargain bazaars, arcades,

dives and dumps, cross-cuts, bootleg cabs...

for almost as long as you could want. And eventually it comes back to what had set it off,
that mournful music, her face in the glass, the sting of gin on my lip.

We are simply not used to poems as long as this these days and so it comes as a bit of a challenge but it's not difficult otherwise and is worth the effort as a coda to an excellent collection, the collection being the real unit of currency here, working as a book as well as individual poems.
It's a bleak vision but a sustained one, sustained in fact by those other poets in concert with Harsent.
The poets seem to be telling us that these are dark times that have crept up on us from somewhere.

From the Archives - Michael Daugherty

I'm sure I'm infringing some copyright here but it's only by way of some genuine hero worship.

The 1978 Kawabata Press booklet, Myths and Legends, by Michael Daugherty and George A. Moore reproduced Daugherty's poem Now.

It seemed then like the poem you could only wish to have written oneself and Daugherty, among these littlepress poets, was the superstar that one admired, like the George Best or Marilyn Monroe, someone that you could never hope to be.

Looking at it again now, I have to wonder if the 'death' at the end of line 9 isn't one of Colin's, the editor's, typos. I don't know but I wish I did.

It is still a tremendous poem and even though if I could have written it in 1978 it seemed as if doing so would have 'lasted me for the rest of my silent days', I now know that it wouldn't have.

Because whatever you've written, you're never happy with it. Even if someone adores what you did in a little magazine 30-odd years ago and is still prepared to say so, it doesn't make you happy enough. It wouldn't for me and I'm sure it doesn't for Michael Daugherty, even though his poem is carved forever on my memory.

Faulks on Fiction

It's a shame Radcliffe & Maconie are leaving Radio 2 and going to the recently saved 6. Just when you start taking something for granted, they take it away. But that is how the world seems to work in its ongoing striving for change without improvement.

I can manage without Radio 6 but would go there for the continuing Northern droll of these two superannuated teenagers. They play a nice mix of listenable new pop music and happily find old soul and reggae classics, are frighteningly knowledgeable and welcome such stars as Nod (Holder) and Simon Armitage to their cosy club but if they are doing the weekday afternoon shift on 6, they'll be no use to me there.

At least Radio 2 is benefitting from an improved Pick of the Pops on Saturday afternoons with Tony Blackburn, at 68 years old, adding some of his anecdotes about the records from years gone by and it's always a cracker if the first hour is taken from the sixties or anytime up to the mid-70's. You can often just concentrate on the horse racing after 2 o'clock if the second hour is well beyond one's period. We will forgive his reported dismissal of early reggae records as 'rubbish' in the light of his devotion to nominating every Tamla Motown single as one of his favourites.

But the BBC have brought in Sebastian Faulks, fine writer and busy, busy man, on Saturday evenings to outline some themes in the English novel. It provides a good excuse to recycle excerpts from the costume dramas of the last several decades but has so far left the more serious reader wondering whether this is what Faulks really thinks or if he's capable of some greater insight but looked at the figure on the contract he was offered and just said, well, okay then.

By all means, he traces a changing fashion in heroes and lovers, thus far, over the generations and despite the possible and inevitable complaints from the feminist point of view, one can't really fault Faulks on his focus on definitely significant titles and authors, which have thus far been predominantly men.

But apart from the erroneous conclusion that we have reached the end of the hero in fiction, he doesn't seem to have presented a thesis. It has always seemed to commentators that they are significant enough to live at the end of a tradition. Dear old Fukuyama announced the End of History when the Berlin Wall was demolished and yet, look, twenty years on, things have kept on happening.

One lecture we were blessed with at University in about 1979 involved the lecturer comparing the history of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama to Pop Music. After Shakespeare, the fashion changed to Ben Jonson's more classical and perhaps cynical style, then Ford and suchlike produced titles like Tis Pity She's a Whore, the whole enterprise was said to have become depraved and eventually the Puritans closed the theatres down. This was supposedly a bit like the revolution that was punk rock, which removed once and for all, for most of us, the pompous ramblings of big, progressive artists. It must have seemed like the end of the world to those steeped in sixties culture but it wasn't. And now, thirty years on, we have Tinie Tempah (born, it says here, 1988 ! ) and pop music isn't over yet. In fact, last night I was hearing talk on the radio of a 'folk revival'. Not exactly 'folk', I'd say, but quaint songs played on acoustic guitars and why not.

So Sebastian isn't living at the end of history, or the end of the hero or central character, and you never know what younger people are going to come up with. But they will find something. Every other generation did. He even gave us his own Engleby that terrified me enough a few years ago, so perhaps his conclusion was a bit lazy.

But we will see what other clips he's got lined up for us. I'm sure they will include Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and that the ladies need not feel left out. I'll always prefer Katherine Mansfield to Martin Amis even though I'm always impressed by the size of the hangover he seems to be carrying. As ever, I don't see it as a gender issue but I suppose if they had asked Hilary Mantel or Sarah Waters to do it then it wouldn't have been a problem.

Well done, Seb. Thanks for trying.

From the Archives - Portsmouth Customs Cricket Club

I was hoping that the jumbled chaos of the archives might offer up a team photo of Portsmouth Customs Cricket team, perhaps one on the tour of Jersey circa 1989, but it hasn't done so yet.

So for the time being here is my favourite scorecard, photocopied from the scorebook when I was looking after the kit bag, where I went in first and scored 38 out of a team total of 64 on 2/7/91. If I hadn't played too confidently (the thesaurus doesn't offer 'carelessly' for this) across the line of Martin Bartlett's wily medium pace, I'd have got at least 44.

The rest of the story is that we got the opposition out for 63, mainly due to an inspired decision by the captain to relieve me of bowling duties before my allocation of overs was done because I was getting tonked.

However, a better bowling display was captured for posterity when I flattened the last man's middle stump with my medium fast bowling which was never quite as quick as I had liked to think, and had the presence of mind to prevent the stumps being removed before I could go and get my camera to record the damage I was so delighted with.

With Fulham not having been in touch since my football archive feature recently, Nottinghamshire are invited to e-mail a contract if they need an all-rounder for the 2011 season.

From the Archives - James MacMillan

I'm not really an autograph hunter but equally won't forego the opportunity to get a book or programme signed by a much-admired artist if it presents itself. Because I'm a fan and prone to star-struck moments and hope to get in and out of any such encounters without making too much of a fool of myself. It doesn't necessarily always go to plan but meeting James MacMillan, the finest composer of my generation, was one time I just about got away with it.

In the Queen Elizabeth Hall on, as you can see, 11/10/97, we saw among other things a performance of a new work about Iona, called I, and at the interval I saw James several rows behind us and I managed to coincide, by subtle judgement of pace, our arrival in the aisle at the end of his row when he arrived there too. So I produced my programme and asked if he could sign it for me and you've never met a more charming man.

Having more of his music taped from radio concerts than on CD's, partly because it wasn't all available anywhere else, I said I hoped he didn't mind that I taped his music from the radio and he kindly said he was glad that I did without issuing me with a demand for royalties or a copyright writ.

He might not be Beethoven but his Seven Last Words from the Cross and Veni, Veni are among the best things I've heard by a living composer and the hand that wrote them signed my programme.

MacMillan is actually a couple of months younger than me and I suffer from a disorder that seems to admire my elders much more than anyone younger. I can take it if the date of birth goes up to, say, the mid-60's, but after that I start to wonder what kids can know. I know that's wrong but I don't know what I can do about it.

I wish I had never been told to respect my elders or that I had always done just as I was told.

From the Archives - Reviews

Going into print is not recommended for the faint-hearted, thin-skinned or overly sensitive. The poems might look nice on the page in a magazine or book but once you've gone in vainglorious search of critical acclaim, you only have yourself to blame if not everyone shares your high opinion of your verses. The critic's job is not to make you feel better but to recommend to other readers whether they think your work is worth their time and attention. So if you are labelled as 'glib' , done by numbers or they've never heard of you, well, at least they were honest. In fact, this selection of reviews of my booklets isn't bad at all. Martin Stannard in PQR is guarded at best on Reptiles in Love in 1997.

Phil Simmons in the same magazine, in 2002, is as kind as he can be about Re-Reading Derrida on a Train.

R.G. Felton in South 36 in 2007 doesn't have a bad word among the few he allocated to Walking on Water.

But Giles Darvill is welcome to a drink if we ever meet for his generous appreciation of Re-Read in South 31 in 2005. That's the sort of appreciation anybody would be delighted with, when it's clear that the critic had read it, saw the point of it and was prepared to say so. I'd prefer a review like that any day rather than any kind of award or prize

From the Archives - The Local Yokels

Although this picture is perhaps only about 6 years old, it takes us further back, in a pluperfect way, to the mid-70's when The Local Yokels were legends in their own lunchtime.

Other top bands in our class at school were QVD- Quatre-Vingt Deux (Jewell, Ball, Horsley), and Tetrarch (Isaacs, Flower) from which Emergency Exit emerged as the genuine sixth form supergroup of teenagers with instruments who could actually play them. Their rousing rendition of my song, Everyone's an Onion, has been given loving revivals on special occasions ever since.

Tim and I found the band name by intuitively knowing, during a fourth year Eng Lit lesson on Thomas Hardy, that Mr. Broome had unwontedly provided it for us. I'm only holding a guitar here for decorous effect in the same way that Bing Crosby was once given a violin with rubber strings to hold. Although I can play as many as eight or ten guitar chords I prefer to be given notice in writing if required to change from the one I'm on to a different one. If we had been Simon & Garfunkel then I wouldn't have been good enough to be Garfunkel and if we'd been Wham then I wasn't even quite Andrew Ridgeley. But perhaps my most inspired contribution to music was the mournful riff played on the home-made bass kazoo of our own imagining and design on our As I Walk Down the Street.

Any plans for a 40th anniversary reunion will, no doubt, be announced here nearer the time, but meanwhile any ex-chart artist looking to restore themselves to the hit parade is invited to apply here in the first instance and we will see what we can do. The Curtis-Green songwriting partnership might have just the thing you are looking for and would be willing to accept their royalties on the download hit of 2011.

From the Archives - Sandwiches 19

The archives include a big wedge of old poetry magazines that I simply can't bear to throw away, many of them from the late 70's when the 60's 'underground' was merging rather incongruously into the punk era.

One of my favourites was Sandwiches, and its number 19, dated July 1977, which was the last edited by Paul Lamprill. I found this one specifically because one poem from it has lived with me for the 34 years since. They Batter and Batter Me: A Modern Aura by Effie Mihopolous (it says here) is beautiful, short and proves that poetry can be at its best and most memorable when not necessarily fully understood but resounding with possibilities. The poem isn't as long as its title and seems to me better than William Carlos Williams' poems about, respectively, a red wheelbarrow or some plums he found in the fridge.

One of my poems in this issue was Tree, in the version before its lines were re-arranged into the shape of a tree, but it shows the influence of McGough on some of my earliest published work although its slanted lines here are due to my scanning now, which I decided to keep for presentational reasons, rather than any contemporary artistic motive, or having to scan it again.

----

But, then again, you can never be too sure. You can quote a story about Fulke Greville one day and find out that a book published about him in the 1970's shed disparaging light on it when you read it the following week.

It's the same with Effie Mihopolous. I was quite prepared to believe it was a nom de plume or the invention of one of the many poets publishing in those magazines at the time. But I'm thrilled to find she was real, and yet saddened at the same time, to find she departed us quite so recently http://journaltips.blogspot.com/2010/01/remembering-effie-mihopoulos.html

Suddenly, although I could hardly believe she existed in the first place, I'm now feeling as if I'd lost a friend.

The least I can do is look her up and find out if she published any books.

Don't ever look up old names. It can only bring heartache

From the Archives - The Beatles

In the mid-1960's, in Nottingham, I was the lucky little kid that even had Beatles wallpaper in my bedroom. My favourite record, by miles, was 'She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah', understanding the basic principle that it provided a good excuse to shout as loud as one could.

It took 30 years or more for me to find out that the reason why it was such a good record is that the subtle use of subversive chords makes it obvious that what Lennon meant was that she loves you and, regrettably, not him.

This was the fan photograph I had framed by my bedside. Ringo was my favourite then because he was the funny one. When I went through the moody, teenage stage (that I'm hoping will end soon), I thought John was best because he was all avant-garde and had Yoko to prove it, but even though we all must now realize that Paul was the best one, we also wonder where it all went wrong. Never has a combination of talents proved to be so much greater than its constituent parts. And also, they went on too long, not not long enough.

Top 6 - Matchbox Twenty

What a terrible name for a pop group, but 'what's in a name?' anyway. The Magnetic Fields isn't a very good name either but then you find out it was taken from the title of a French novel that I'm afraid I couldn't find, but another by the same author didn't hold my interest for long enough to finish it. Oh, yes, Andre Breton. Now I remember.

One of those strange little stories happened a few years ago when I was asked, 'Do you still like Matchbox Twenty', as if I'd been found out, but by someone who I'm sure I'd never spoken with about them. Someone had been talking out of school, but I don't mind. I realize that AOR, FM, Mainstream rock isn't cool but I've long maintained that 'cool' is only in the eye of the beholder, that there's no such thing and that, although I'm not supposed to like this sort of thing, I'm afraid I do happen to like what they do.

Rob Thomas once said, I seem to remember, that they wanted to be Fleetwood Mac. I think he meant they wanted to make a lot of great records and sell millions of copies of them but if he meant they all wanted to get off which each other and tear themselves apart, well, it's all good.

They've somehow come back onto my playlist recently and I'm enjoying them just as much as I ever did. It's passionately expressed and takes itself a bit seriously perhaps but it goes well late at night towards the end of some bottles of cheap wine.

So, I had to go back and investigate if they'd had an album out recently and found that Exile on Mainstream is a Greatest Hits package with six new tracks. Well, I'm sorry, I'm a fan but not a completist and I'm not falling for that old trick.

Top 6 would need to include Leave, Last Beautiful Girl, Back 2 Good, Push, Disease and perhaps Hang. So the Greatest Hits selection isn't a bad effort.

Although I didn't ever rate it their best, it's been Last Beautiful Girl, that's been unremovable from my head or from my repertoire of badly-sung office tunes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBIQ_jYxHCU

What's the matter with that.

Don't ever feel you have to apologize for liking what you like. You'll never be one of the cool kids if they see you doing that. And, although there's no need to say so, you know that their record collection is full of stuff that they don't enjoy half as much but are still trying to because they think they should.

Top 6 - Fulke Greville

Being a contemporary of Shakespeare, Donne and Ben Jonson might not look like the best way of taking one’s place in posterity’s notebook but, there again, being a minor player in a Golden Age might be a greater honour than having one’s name at the forefront of a less well regarded period. But these shouldn’t be the sort of questions that keep us awake all night.
Picking Neil Powell’s Carcanet edition of Fulke Greville off the shelf at a time when no other book was demanding more immediate attention, I was surprised how several poems still seemed familiar from whenever the last time was I did so. It’s possible to see his dark, personal demons and meditations on a strange universe as not wanting in the least in comparison with the more household names of his contemporaries when some find Shakespeare’s Sonnets ‘sugar’d’ if brilliant, Donne sometimes demandingly intellectual and Ben Jonson reputedly more concerned with Ben Jonson’s reputation than anything else.
Although Powell sees Greville as ‘self-effacing’ and having led a ‘comparatively long and quiet life’, I don’t think we have reason to think it was as quiet as all that but his death, apparently murdered by a servant for whom he had made no provision in his will, seems like a dreadful tactical mistake by the servant. Why would one take steps to bring that will into force so soon when a more pointed act of service might have given the courtier reason to include the faithful retainer in the will. It is, of course, the shadowy remnants of evidence that make these biographical details sometimes as interesting as the poems but I’ll be off to Amazon New & Used to see what other books there are on the subject to shed whatever dubious light there is on the subject.
And, although perhaps it is as Sir Philip Sidney's biographer that he is most remembered, that doesn't mean that represents his just desserts.
Greville’s poems, in Powell’s selection at least, all come from Caelica, which seems to me an ongoing project that includes most of his output, not unlike Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Tony Harrison’s School of Eloquence, titles that anything suitable were included into.
I’m sure that the precious and unnecessary denomination of ‘poem sequence’ would not have occurred to him and I wish it didn’t occur to anybody now either. Poetry either consists of a poem, which can come in several parts, or a collection of poems but there is no need of the ‘sequence’.
Another tremendous thing about the poetry of 400 years ago is the way that poets didn’t seem to strive for their ‘own voice’ in a vainglorious pursuit of individuality or ‘finding themselves’. In fact, it seems, in Gunn’s phrase, that they ‘did not search much for uniqueness of voice’ but, having apparently aspired to some sort of orthodoxy, their personality, if worth having, is still available in the same way that Bach and Handel, or Haydn and Mozart, wrote music very much within the same stylistic constraints but anybody who knows the difference can nearly always see it.
So, I’m delighted to be able to pick a Top 6 of Fulke Greville that goes C, LX, LXXXIV, the seemingly promiscuous LXXI and LXXII, and LXIV, which I’m sure Thom Gunn would have written had he been writing at the time. Never has a poet provided titles that disguise their content quite so mundanely.
Just a little bit of elucidation might help. For instance, C’s first line is ‘In night, when colours all to black are cast’ and ends with a modern-looking psychological insight,
And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

And LX includes such misanthropic miseries as,
Caelica, ‘tis true, I do in darkness go,
Honour I seek not, or hunt after fame:
I am thought-bound, I do not long to know,

And so on.

It was an auspicious decision to pick this book up for another look. I can hardly recommend him highly enough and I’m going to make sure I have investigated what bargains are available on the subject before you’ve read this.

From the Archives - The Glory Years at Ottakars

One's career has reached a new low when, having raised the required enthusiasm to actually send some poems to a magazine, they are returned unopened because you hadn't put enough postage on them. Exactly how 4 sheets of A4 in a brown envelope can need more than a first class stamp is beyond me but, never mind. It doesn't actually make any difference to me because I've seen the poems but it's a thrill denied to the readers that some might now never see those poems.

It wasn't always thus. As recently as April 2006, I was collecting prizes - here at Ottakars bookshop in Portsmouth for being judged best poem by them in their branch before missing out on the monkey that the National winner got.

Magazines would sometimes send me money for pieces they printed, I'd turn up at places and read to people. It was just like being a literary figure of the minorest kind. But although the evidence of the picture suggests it made me very happy at the time, I don't know. It's not as if it made any difference and others are welcome to have their names in such places now.

Thanks to Selina for taking the picture, eventually. She nearly forgot.