Delusions of grandeur...

Followed the Larkin-themed night at the theatre with a drink in one of his old haunts (and subject of a poem) - Hull's Royal Station Hotel. I really like the place. Mainly because it has ridiculous delusions of grandeur and is frequented by shabby, equally deluded, clientele. A great place to people watch.

Much of today I was in a daze. Which was great given that I was lecturing and young people were staring at me waiting for 'the answer'. The crash has left me in pain and thoroughly exhausted. At lunch I headed across town to lunch with M. Although, when I got there, she was in a meeting so we were unable to sit together (I'm rude but not that rude). A sandwich arrived at M's table which she had ordered for me. M indicated I should take it, which I did and then, bearing in mind that I needed to dash back across town, quickly cleared the plate. It was only at the end of the day that I was informed that only half of the sandwich was mine to eat. Oops.

Why does the toad work...

Out filming at Vista festival in Hull today, attempting to get people to wax lyrical about Hull's adopted son Philip Larkin. We did ok but still probably need another 50 more interviews. Finest response today was from a young woman who asked, "Is he the guy that abandoned slavery?" Other interviewees gave intelligent, thoughtful responses; one interpreted the poem Cut Grass via the medium of dance. Lots of people, as expected, only knew Larkin as the man wot wrote "that thing about your parents ruining your life" or "innee summat to do wiv turds?". During one interview a somewhat desperate father pushed his very young children into the shot, mistaking us for a film crew doing something important.

Cut out and keep guide to life as writer #793...

"I remember saying once, I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: it's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. Whoever I was talking to said, They'd do that, too, if their agents could fix it."

Philip Larkin, An Interview with Paris Review, 1982

Chronic inactivity in an epic frame...

Hull is about to go Larkin crazy, with a several month-long celebration of, erm, the man's death. As was pointed out in The Guardian Review last month, "there will be no attempt to rebrand him as a genial figure who arrived at work each day with a spring in his step". Which is a good thing, obviously. I've just re-read an essay that Martin Amis wrote for the New Yorker in 1993 and was published in Amis's 2001 collection The War Against Cliche. The opening goes...

"In 1985, the year of his death, Philip Larkin was unquestionably England's unofficial laureate, our best-loved poet since the war: better loved qua poet, than John Betjeman, who was loved also for his charm, his famous giggle, his patrician bohemianism, and his televisual charisma, all of which Larkin notably lacked. Now, in 1993, Larkin is something like a pariah, or an untouchable. He who was beautiful is suddenly found to be ugly."

The few people I've spoken to recently re Larkin have said terrible things about him; they are very much in that 1993 state of mind. In 2010, Larkin looks set to return to his previous state, and be much-loved again. I like that. Sometimes, when I'm walking in a fug through Pearson Park near his old house, or near his other place on Newland Park, or am strolling along Cottingham Road, or enter the grounds of the University of Hull, I sometimes find myself wishing that he'd ride his bike into me.

Talking about Andrew Motion's biography Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, Amis describes the book - full, as it is, of a "poverty of event" - as "chronic inactivity in an epic frame". Love that phrase. Good title for an emo album, perhaps?