The year was 2013 and I was shivering at my desk in the Rare Books Reading Room, cataloguing the papers of an eccentric Victorian polymath as per the terms of my employment, when the door swung open and a distinguished-looking, cheery-sounding gentleman strode towards me. ‘I hear you’re a poet’, he said – Adam Crothers, who also worked in the library, having dobbed me in. ‘Why don’t you send me some poems?’ Well. Breaks don’t get much luckier than that: the editor of the UK’s best poetry magazine and publishing house walking up to you, offering to read your poems, which he has time to do because the college you happen to work for is also currently employing him as its Writer/Editor-in-Residence. The timing was especially fortunate. I’d been writing poems in a semi-focused way for a couple of years, and had a set of twenty or so in a document that I’d recently put together with a view to entering some pamphlet competition or other. Feeling decidedly squeamish, but with an awareness that I had very much more to gain than to lose, I attached the document to an email.

Dear Michael… An appropriate opener, given the kindness, instruction, encouragement, inspiration and spontaneous amusement I’ve derived from a decade’s correspondence with the beloved Professor Schmidt OBE. Following our first scheduled meeting in Patisserie Valerie, where Michael drank three Americanos while galloping through the many interests and objections he’d noted in my document, I revised the poems and sent back the eight he’d liked most, which were subsequently printed in PN Review ...