I’d go to see that.

Still live in hope.
I’ll miss (necessarily) my obit there. But it will be an interesting one!

I remember getting a couple of days off school in I suppose 1977, when I went there to hear about writing with Paul Muldoon, James Simmons and John Morrow. Amazingly exciting then, and in retrospect too. Simmons put a poem I wrote in class in the Tele - first publication! So, bless the tech!

Lovely poem, which wears its debt to Larkin on its sleeve (and I admire that). There’s also - not an allusion and still less a direct debt - a coincidence in that “east Anglian sky”: Yeats’s “The Cold Heaven” was started on a bright cold day in a train approaching Norwich. (An English poem, then?)

I remember going to a poetry reading at Queen’s where CM compèred his three prize exhibits: Heaney, Muldoon, and Paulin. They were interesting to watch in the presence of the Boss.

I like the idea of an interval!

Time for the tv mini series, no?

Interesting how misreadings sometimes shed light on submerged issues… Or how SH, having eaten his cake, refused to have it.

I believe the house in question was once a brothel (which might have aroused Larkin’s interest). Or else someone was pulling my leg.

Had to look up the list, I’m afraid. Think I know which book you mean, but haven’t read it (or any of the others). I may do, but am in no hurry. My bad, as they say. I’ve seen too many in my time to take prizes and shortlists at all seriously.

I wonder could we make 'late splurge' a common term - I quite like it! W.S. Landor is the only poet (to my knowledge) whose complete poems has, as well as a 'Juvenilia' section, one called simply 'Senilia'. Which again I like: a useful category (no names, no pack drill).

Well, yes. Though I've always found it quite funny, Geoffrey desperately covering all the bases. I'm sorry he dropped it for the Collected (Broken Hierarchies), since this deadpan, Les Dawson-esque humour got lost. His last Ox Prof lecture ended with quotation from Charlie Brooker: "NOW GO AWAY".

The Elbow Room: long gone, but should have had a blue plaque - “Louis MacNeice (and half the BBC) often drank here while supposed to be working”.