First Four Questions

The TLS has its own Twenty Questions feature. It's a long time since I ended my subscription  but their e-mail still arrives each week, giving a tempting glimpse of what one could have if one went to the lengths of finding a shop that sold their paper.

Nevertheless, a questionnaire is hard to decline even if it's only the first four questions out of twenty that one can see. It's only the same as it ever was, not being able to watch a quiz on telly without taking part and not quite as much reading these questionnaires for an insight into the inner lives of the eminent person interviewed as thinking what one would have said oneself. So, as far as it goes, 

 “How can I know what I think, until I see what I say?” (E. M. Forster). How much of your writing surprises you?

Not all that much by now. I'm unlikely to suddenly find out in the process of writing anything that I believe in God, had misjudged Boris Johnson or should have been listening to Pink Floyd and Bruckner rather than Tamla Motown and Bach and Handel. 

On the other hand, if any piece of writing doesn't find something one hadn't been expecting to say then it was probably not worth writing.

What is the first thing you remember reading or having read to you?

Thomas the Tank Engine was certainly the first book I ever borrowed from a library, Nottingham, circa 1965. There were the heroic escapades of a collie dog called Black Bob. 

But, probably like most people of my age, Janet and John was the first set text at school.

Is there a particular sentence that has stayed with you throughout your life?

Not one, no. Plenty of good lines from great poems or novels. But, an almost throwaway line that Danny Baker used to use when encourgaing listeners to take part in his radio phone-ins,

All you've got to be is any good. Not throughout my life but for about the last twenty-five years.

What is the most interesting item on your bookshelf?

It's surely got to be a book signed by a poet who I thought of as a god at the time and for a long time afterwards. My copy of Touch by Thom Gunn. I was overawed in his presence in Cambridge in 1979 when he did so and he was kind enough to make a conversational gambit. But, no. I could think of nothing to say by way of reply.

Related to that is a magazine called Navis, no.6, Summer 1997, on the back of which my name appears in block capitals as a contributor to that issue, above Gunn's in ordinary type who had been in a previous issue. I got paid just about enough for that poem to spend it on a copy of the magazine with Gunn in. 

My copy of Larkin at Sixty, ed. Thwaite, was bought from one of his secretaries that he had given it to but I have no evidence ot its provenance.