Celeb-spotting and other stories

Week after week, year on year, the Times columnists churn it out. Caitlin Moran, Giles Coren, Robert Crampton, often the same, old same old sort of thing. Like I do, too, here. I'm sure I've made even that point before but they get paid for it whereas I do it for fun. Giles seems to me the laziest with his unfunny 'listicles', Caitlin is usually worth a look and today, for once, I take up Robert's theme and do my own variation on it. Famous people seen in public, not when one is expecting to see them. Going to a Simon Armitage poetry reading and seeing Simon Armitage or seeing Beryl Burton at a bike race don't count.

Perhaps the first, possibly in 1971, was when my mother recognized Dai Francis, if we can still mention a star of the Black and White Minstrel Show. It was not far from the stage door of a theatre but we weren't going to the show. She did well considering he was in disguise as himself and not made up.

Me and my mate, as it happens relevantly in this piece, once saw Caitlin Moran when we were outside the National Gallery. She noticed me noticing her but unless she is exceptionally well up on little-known poets, the recognition wasn't mutual. 

The National Gallery seems like a profitable zone in this game. One of my two sightings of Michael Palin was as he came out of an exhibition of Vermeer and his contemporaries in the carbuncle. While the attendants necessarily acknowledged him, it occured to me that being famous might be tiresome as a 24/7 job so I didn't trouble him with any parrot-related quip. The other time I saw him was at the back entrance to Somerset House.

I did nod to Michael Rosen, though, as I looked round after watching the river flow by the Royal Festival Hall and caught his eye. A good man, not quite as universally recognizable as a Python and I thought one man of letters could salute another even if he didn't know I was one.

Seeing Queen Elizabeth II coming out of parliament on what was probably the day of the Queen's speech might not qualify but seeing her come out of Southampton docks and out of a lunchtime pub window on her way to Portsmouth dockyard were chance encounters that do. King Charles, when he was Prince, leaving a concert in Fairford Church is inadmissable because we waited for him.

Patrick Moore in the Lancaster University bookshop when he was on campus to give a talk is a borderline case. I think it's okay because, as with all of these people, I like them more or less and I'll do without Terry Hall of the Specials who sat at the same small table as I was at in the college bar at Lancaster before a gig I wasn't going to because I never rated him and was not impressed.

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Elvis Costello sang that 'radio is a sound salvation' with some caustic irony but for me it mostly is. There's all kinds of things one comes across during the night and one programme recently triggered a major new poetry allegiance with the archive item on Dana Gioia. But Test Match Special seems to me as good as it ever was when it was Johnners, Arlott, Trevor Bailey, Fred Trueman and all. Aggers is a brilliant broadcaster, Zaltzman conjures the most abstruse satistics out of his computer that would make Bill Frindall swoon; Tuffers has matured into a wise man from the fly boy he began as and Cookie and Vaughany are admirable, as are the ladies, Ebony and Isa. 

A surprise birthday present last year was a collection of pieces by Aggers and Tuffers and I'm floored by the elegant taste with which it was chosen, the buyer being one I'd hardly ever mention cricket to. 

It has helped that the test series just ending has been tremendous, day by day and session by session. It's only a pity that the demands of monetizing the product has meant it has had to be forced through too quickly in order to make room for the Hundred which is dull.

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Not a day is going by without Dana Gioia increasing in staure, for me, which means me finally realizing the stature he has long achieved. The Atlantic Ocean seems very wide when I think how long it's taken me to pick up the signal.

Dana Gioia: Poet and Critic, edited by John Zheng and Jon Parrish Peede (Mercer, 2024), is an exemplary collection of essays that provides all one wants of a way in to his work and it's taking me from vague acquaintance to substantial grasp most effectively in quick time. And, lo and behold, as good things tend to pile up when they are going well, looking to add to my newly-instituted Gioia section, looking for a signed edition to add to the long-neglected Signed Poetry Books here, a very reasonably priced volume is signed to William Oxley, author of one of the essays and what a thing to have that will be shortly.