My Culture Fix

 My Culture Fix is a feature in the Saturday Times in which a celebrity of some perceived cultural import answers some searching questions. Melvyn Bragg got more than most of them do this week and so, having always wanted to have a go, here's me,

My favourite author or book

Dubliners is my favourite book and has been for maybe 40 years. I don't know if James Joyce loses any points at all for taking prose fiction to a place it couldn't be expected to return from. He did what he felt the need to do. He'd done Dubliners, and then Ulysses, and then Finnegans Wake and, unlike Haydn or Vivaldi or maybe even Bach, didn't see the need to do anything similar again.

The book I'm reading

Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and other stories by Nikolai Leskov, but I often read two books a week and sometimes find it hard to remember much about them a few weeks later.

The book I wish I'd written

Nothing by anybody else. Those books belong to their authors, not me. I wish I could write a novel worthy of the name. There could still be time but it's looking unlikely.

The book I couldn't finish

Possibly the first book I abandoned was My Childhood by Maxim Gorky which we were given to read at school. Maybe I should give it another try, about 48 years later, since most of what we were offered was good and it might have been Solzhenitsyn I was reading instead. I'm perfectly happy to pack up on books these days if need be. It needs to be a pleasure, not a duty. I was advised to stick with Captain Corelli's Mandolin beyond its first 50 pages and then it would be good but I didn't make the cut.

The book I'm ashamed I haven't read

None, really. I'm hoovering them up since finishing full-time work and so the likes of Don Quixote, much of Dickens, all of them, are all on the radar as long as I look and find a reason to believe I want to.

My favourite film

French, 1990's. Difficult to decide between Depardieu, Emmanuelle Beart and Vanessa Paradis. Tous les Matins du Monde, Un Coeur en Hiver and Noce Blanche. I'm not at all a film person but they were all sensational.

My favourite play.

Hamlet. In a category of its own.

The Box set that I'm hooked on

Box set? Hooked on? If they're talking about DVD's, the question doesn't apply. But I spent some of the profit from horse racing a few years ago on Ton Koopman's box of CD's of the Opera Omnia, the Complete Works, of Dietrich Buxtehude and it is one of my favourite things.

My favourite TV series

Fawlty Towers

My favourite piece of music

There's Spem in Alium, there's Josquin's Deploration on the death of Johannes Ockeghem, a lot of Tamla Motown back catalogue and hundreds of other candidates but I usually give it to the Buxtehude Trio Sonata, here,

The last piece of music that made me cry

The Carnival is Over by The Seekers when I found out Judith Durham had died last week.

The lyric I wish I'd written

As above, Smokey Robinson or Holland-Dozier-Holland, but they set a standard it was all but impossible to beat. I did my little best.

The poem that saved me

or, alternatively, ruined me by making me so devoted to it that it took the rest of my life to escape from it. My Sad Captains by Thom Gunn. It's a wonderful poem but one shouldn't become so mesmerised by one poem or poet. 

The instrument I played

No more than 8 or 10 chords, badly, on cheap guitars but I always knew I wasn't a musician.

The instrument I wish I'd learnt

If only I'd been capable, it might have been gorgeous. By all means, piano or cello but there was no point. I've been stuck with words, doing as much as I can with them, all the time increasingly thinking that musicians and painters get by much better without them.

The music that cheers me up

The Buxtehude, as above. All of the above but being 'cheered up' shouldn't have to be music's job.

If I could own one painting, it would be...

impossible to get insurance for it living in my house. Vermeers are so rare that they are priceless. It's not entirely out of the question that I might buy something by Maggi Hambling just to show that I could.

The place I feel happiest

It might be Prestbury Park, Cheltenham, as long as my horses are winning.

My guiltiest cultural pleasure        

Isn't it such an English, maybe Victorian, thing to associate pleasure with guilt. Challenge TV have the 1980's gameshow, Bullseye, on seemingly endless repeat but watching it whenever I notice it doesn't make me feel guilty.  I'd feel far worse about myself if I still liked Pink Floyd.

I'm having a fantasy dinner party, I'll invite these artists and authors...

or, rather, I'm not. 

I'd gladly buy Shakespeare a few pints in a quiet corner of a pub, not to talk to him about poetry or plays but to get his version of his biography. Not to sell it, not for profit, only so that I might hear it from him. When did you move from Stratford to London, for example.

And I'll put on this music

No, none of that. It's far too much. Maybe invite Bach, Mozart and Handel round and play them the Velvet Underground, Metal Guru and Wig Wam Bam and see what they thought.

The concert I'm looking forward to

Black Uhuru in the Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea, followed by Tuesday lunchtimes in Chichester cathedral, and Portsmouth on Thursdays, throughout the Autumn.

The play I walked out of

Murder in the Cathedral, in Portsmouth cathedral. I didn't go back in after half time.