Wendy Cope | poetryarchive.org Tweet Widget About Wendy Cope Wendy Cope (b. 1945) is a poet whose witty lyrics and pitch-perfect parodies have gained her a readership far beyond most of her peers. Born in Erith, Kent, she read History at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. She then taught in primary schools in London before becoming a freelance writer in 1986. Her debut collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, struck a chord with its lampooning of literary pretensions and its wry look at contemporary relationships, and has sold over 180,000 copies to date. Her subsequent collections - Serious Concerns in 1992 and If I Don't Know in 2001 (shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award) - both confirmed her reputation as a classic English humorist whilst also allowing room for poems of a more meditative tone. She has edited several poetry anthologies, including Heaven on Earth: 101 happy poems, and her poems for children are widely anthologised. She was made an O.B.E. in the Queen's Birthday honours 2010.

She currently lives in Winchester. Cope's rueful wisdom connects her to the tradition of Betjeman and Larkin, but she brings a fresh female perspective to bear on social and literary foibles. She has said of her parodies that they were a way "of coming to terms with what was fashionable in poetry" and in their unerring accuracy and mastery of form she showed she could match any of her male contemporaries. Men in general are often the target of her barbed wit, none more so than Strugnell, the hapless and rather unpleasant male poet she invented for her first collection. Long before Bridget Jones sipped her first Chardonnay, Cope was casting a satirical eye over the minefield of contemporary sexual politics: "Bloody men are like bloody buses/You wait for about a year/And as soon as one approaches your stop/Two or three others appear." Whilst Cope has little time for bleeding hearts, her poems can be poignant as well as humorous.

A new mood of contentment infuses her most recent collection with poems of domestic celebration like 'Being Boring' or the unabashed tenderness of 'On a Train': "Long, radiant minutes,/your hand in my hand." Cope keeps her explanations droll and to the point, wisely allowing the poems their own voice. Containing a generous selection from her three books this recording is a wonderful showcase for the emotional and technical deftness that's made her work so widely cherished. Her recording was made for The Poetry Archive on 8 December 2005 at The Audio Workshop, London and was produced by Richard Carrington. Wendy Cope returned to the recording studio for a second reading on 18 April 2016, recording at Heavy Entertainment, London, with Richard Carrington as producer. Wendy Cope has written this note about her more recent work: "Since my earlier recording for the archive in 2005, I have published one new collection of poems, Family Values (2011), and am close to completing the next. Some of the poems in this new recording are from the book; others are as yet uncollected.

The title, Family Values, is ironic, although I’m not sure that was clear to everyone who bought the book – some of them may have been disappointed. There are quite a few poems about my childhood, a subject I could address with more freedom after the death of my mother in 2004. The book also includes two commissioned sequences, The Audience, written for the Endellion String Quartet, and An ABC of the BBC, commissioned for a Radio 4 programme. Two poems from each sequence can be heard in the recording. Two of the uncollected poems included here are also the result of a commission, this time from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. I was asked to write some poems to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The rest are a miscellany. John Cage, Jesus, The Archbishop of Canterbury, a damaged piano, a college reunion. I can’t see a theme. One thing I notice, looking at the two lists – recent and less poems – is that proportionally fewer of the recent ones make use of rhyming forms. I still love traditional forms, especially the Shakespearian sonnet, and have no intention of abandoning them.

But it’s always been important to me to be able to do the other thing – as I put it to myself. Some people say there is no such thing as free verse, so I don’t call it that. I don’t know what to call it but I hope some of these poems demonstrate that I can do it." Wendy Cope's Favourite Poetry Sayings: "The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it." - Samuel Johnson "His chief desire was to express himself and his own truth - and therefore life and humanity." - Walter de la Mare on Edward Thomas "Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators." - Albert Camus "I give to the world what I have in my heart, and that is the end of it. " - Franz Schubert Interviews and other readings Wendy Cope muses on the lines that keep coming back, the challenges... Additional material and useful links BBC Poetry Season - Cope Wendy Cope talks to English File in 1989 about humour, the women's movement and how poetry can help to boil eggs.

Behold, a happy poet | The Independent Features Behold, a happy poet After a shaky start, Wendy Cope has become that rarest of things: a best-selling poet, and also a contented one. Christina Patterson meets a true oxymoron Thursday 29 May 2008 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture "Sometimes", said the poet Sheena Pugh in a poem which was, for a while, plastered all over the London Underground, "things don't go, after all,/ from bad to worse." Sometimes, she adds, "green thrives", "crops don't fail", "a man aims high" and "all goes well". And sometimes, she didn't add, a poet can be happy. Yes, even a poet who has won the hearts and, more rarely, the wallets of hundreds of thousands of readers around the world for poems that chronicle, with heart-stopping honesty and the kind of clear-eyed precision that can have you blushing with recognition, the infinite varieties of human loneliness and misery.

Twenty two years after the publication of Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, the collection that shot her into what passes in the poetry world for a stratosphere, and 16 years after Serious Concerns, a book about disappointment that struck a chord so deep that it has sold more than 180,000 copies, Wendy Cope is happy. She has a sheen she didn't have when I first met her 20 years ago. You could call it poise, you could call it elegance but actually, I think it's just happiness. Happiness and love. Her new book, Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979-2006 (Faber & Faber, 12.99) takes its title from a poem in Serious Concerns which addresses, with Copeian brevity, the tricky issue of how to recover from that immobilising mental and physical condition called being in love. "Don't see him. Don't phone or write a letter," is the first option. The second,"The easy way: get to know him better," is characteristic understatement infused with a wry realism wrung from hard-won experience.

After more than her fair share of disastrous love affairs, 14 years ago Cope opted for the second. She first met the poet Lachlan Mackinnon in 1986, the year Making Cocoa came out, but "didn't bump into him for a while" and finally moved in with him in 1994. It didn't cure her love or his. Fairy-tale endings are rare in literature, rarer in poetry and even rarer in life. But sometimes, as Pugh says, life bucks the trend. "I just wept for happiness to have such a nice life," says Cope. "I didn't have to be tough and alone any more. It was just safe." Fairies, in fact, featured prominently in the kinds of poems she discovered at school, which is why, as a child, she didn't much like poetry. "In those days," she says, "it was all about nature and fairies and the boring bits of Christina Rossetti." She did, however, get a taste of poetic rhythm from her father's bedtime renderings of The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Old-fashioned stuff, you might think, except that her father was born in 1885, three years after The Charge of the Light Brigade was written. Chairman of a department store in Erith, he was a childless widower when he married his much younger secretary and nearly 60 when Wendy was born. She and her sister were packed off to boarding school at seven. "The excuse," she explains, "was that they thought we'd have much more fun with other children our own age, but what I actually think is that my mother just couldn't be bothered to have us at home." Academically, Cope did well, well enough to get to Oxford, where she read history. She had plenty of friends but suffered from depression, which "nobody seemed to notice", from "about the age of three". When she was 27, and teaching in a primary school in the Old Kent Road, she began to feel that she couldn't (sorry, but there's no other word) cope. "I've always had this fear," she confides, "that I just wouldn't be able to manage and I'd end up in the gutter.

I've always found the whole business of earning a living really stressful." A friend suggested psychoanalysis and soon, on a subsidised scheme, she was seeing someone five times a week. "In some ways," she confesses, "I got worse before I got better. At one stage, my analyst was seeing me on Sunday morning because I couldn't get through the weekend." It's hard to imagine now. Today, the woman who used to spend many evenings downing considerable quantities of sauvignon at venues around Soho who wrote a poem called "Loss", which equates the disappearance of the corkscrew with the disappearance of her lover sips a carrot-and-orange juice. "I don't go to parties." she says in "Being Boring", a poem in If I Don't Know, a collection published in 2001, seven years after her discovery of domestic happiness, "Well, what are they for,/ If you don't need to find a new lover?/ You drink and you listen and you drink a bit more/ And you take the next day to recover." The misery was real enough, but it did bear wonderful fruit.

After some time in analysis, Cope started writing poems haiku and then, surprisingly for a poet known for her adherence to form free verse. "Rhymes and jokes and stuff didn't come till later," she explains. They came, in fact, when she started going to a poetry group run by Blake Morrison. In due course, she was invited by Faber to submit some poems for an ongoing series of poetry anthologies, Poetry Introduction ("the most exciting thing that ever happened in my literary career") and to put together a programme of literary parodies for Radio 3 based around a slightly hopeless, suggestible (and fictional) poetic character called Jason Strugnell. Perhaps surprisingly for a poet regarded by many as a sort of patron saint of single women, it was, says Cope, the male poets of her generation who were most encouraging: not just Blake Morrison and Craig Raine, who published her at Faber, but also Andrew Motion, DM Thomas and James Fenton. "When I was the most famous poet who hadn't published a book yet," she says, "lots of people were very nice to me". With the publication of Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis the title comes from a poem about a dream that changed.

Readers adored the wry wit and acute intelligence, and an emotional range that danced from broken-heartedness to the utter, ecstatic exuberance of falling in love. Poets were rather less generous. Some critics dismissed the work, in its deceptive simplicity, as "light verse" a category of poetry that Auden thought applied to pretty much all good poetry before Milton and some choked on their bile that here was that oxymoronic phenomenon, a popular poet. As the publicity machine went mad, and journalists fought to interview her, Cope found herself struggling again. "One isn't allowed to whinge about this sort of thing," she says, "but I was just a schoolteacher and it was really terrifying." When the book came out, she no longer even had the support of colleagues. She gave up teaching around publication and had a period of extreme loneliness. "Between about 1986 and 1994, when I moved in with Lachlan, what I said to myself was, 'I am in very difficult circumstances and I'm not doing too badly, in that I'm living alone in London' and being a freelance writer, and not having a partner was a very isolated situation.

I'd go to parties and things, but I had nobody to talk to when the washing machine broke down." The misery was more than apparent in her next collection, and her best, Serious Concerns in 1992, though it was missed by many critics. "One reviewer said it was written out of deep despair, but I think he was probably the only one who saw [that]." Some were, no doubt, antagonised by what they might have seen as an anti-male message. Poems like "Bloody Men", which explores the premise that "Bloody men are like bloody buses", either appearing all at once or not at all, did not endear her to the average male reviewer, nor did poems with titles like "Men and their Boring Arguments". What they failed to see was this was not about hatred, but loneliness. And then it all changed. If I Don't Know chronicles that change: the joy of eating pasta and drinking white wine on a summer evening, "clusters of white blossom" in the garden, the intense, electric, soaring delight and relief of "Being Boring" the end, above all, of all the exhausting effort.

It's probably true, as some critics said, that it lacks the edge of Cope's earlier work, but it still has extremely fine poems. In the end, "I'd rather have a happy life. Sometimes, I think I've written all I'm going to write, sometimes I feel I've only scratched the surface... I hope I'll be spared for a good long time to be going on with it." So do I. After what she has contributed to the poetry of the 20th and 21st century poetry which captures a zeitgeist but which will, I believe, last Wendy Cope deserves a happy life. But I want more poems, too. Biography: Wendy Cope Wendy Cope was born in 1945 in Erith, Kent, where she grew up. She read history at St Hilda's College, Oxford, before becoming a primary-school teacher. She became a full-time writer in 1986 on the publication of Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis. Her second collection, Serious Concerns, was published in 1982 and her third, If I Don't Know, shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award, in 2001.

She has published poems for children, including The River Girl, and edited several poetry collections. Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979-2006 is published by Faber. Sales of her books have topped half a million. Cope was a judge of last year's Man Booker prize. She lives in Winchester with the poet Lachlan Mackinnon. More about: Family Values, By Wendy Cope | The Independent Family Values, By Wendy Cope Thursday 7 April 2011 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture For many years, Wendy Cope was practically the patron saint of single women. In Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, which turned her into that oxymoron, a bestselling poet, and its follow-up, Serious Concerns, she wrote with wry wit and sometimes heart-stopping honesty about failed love affairs, loneliness and disappointment.

She wrote, of course, about a lot of other things, too, but for most readers it was the poems about "bloody men" being like "bloody buses", or about struggling to improve your looks, or books, or health, or life – in, for example, a poem she called, with supreme irony, "Some More Light Verse" – that hit a sometimes very painful nerve. In If I Don't Know, published 15 years after Making Cocoa..., the mood changed. As precise and witty as ever, Cope continued to write brilliant parodies of other poets, and to cast her merciless eye over a world that, even when cruel, seemed ripe for satire. But she also wrote poems that strongly implied that she was – well, happy. Although you shouldn't conflate the "I" of a poem with the poet, you'd have to be a determined deconstuctionist to ignore the fact that this was the first collection she wrote since finding love.

If the defining mood before was along the lines of her poem "Advice to Young Women", that "Whatever you do, life is hell", now it was more like the "Fireworks Poem" she wrote for the Salisbury Festival: "Write it in fire across the night: / Some men are more or less all right". A decade on, Family Values continues the mood of domestic contentment, but also, as late middle age gives way (at least in the poet's head) to early old age, looks back towards childhood and forwards towards death. Very touchingly, the poems, which are as tightly controlled and technically adept as ever, are infused with the gratitude that Cope still feels for the love she has found, and the "lovely life" it has given her. They are also infused with compassion for those who lack the happiness that for so long eluded her. "A Christmas Song", which opens the collection, takes up the theme (and the title) of an earlier poem about how "unbelievably dreadful" Christmas is if you're single, and extends it to "everyone whose burden,/ Carried through the year," is heavier at "the season of good cheer".

Some of the rawest poems (in emotional terms; Cope's writing is never technically anything other than highly accomplished) are about childhood, and in particular about a withholding mother Cope has clearly found hard to forgive. Poems like "Sunday Morning" and "You're Not Allowed", which still quiver with the pain of a child's bewilderment about always being "in the wrong", show the howling inadequacy of the label that Cope attracted on first publication, and attracts still: "light verse". Whatever else these poems are, they are not light. Like the poems of gratitude for "the years of warmth and love and Christmas trees", and those about seeing friends who live far away, perhaps for the last time, they are written with the deceptive simplicity of all Cope's work, but are also electric with emotion that ranges from anger and fear to sometimes wounded love. In "Boarders", Cope says that she was teased at boarding school for using "too many long words". "I soon learned not to," she says.

"Look at how I write." Yes, look at how she writes: in the plainest of plain language, in poems with fabulously complicated rhyme schemes (sonnets, villanelles, and even the odd pantoum) but which shine with the simplicity of a ballad, or a song. Many are about death and the fear of dying. Some brought tears to my eyes. In "Spared", she imagines the pain of those in the "blazing tower" on that New York September day, and, echoing Emily Dickinson, writes of her hard-won understanding that "love is all, is all there is". It was Philip Larkin's message, too, of course: that "what will survive of us is love". At her best, Wendy Cope is as good as Larkin. Write it in fire across the night: Wendy Cope is much more than all right. clinic » Making Cocoa for who now? Making Cocoa for who now?

Rachael Allen • November 25 2010 // Uncategorized • Intelligence Squared , the global forum for live debate, have given us two FREE TICKETS to give to you guys for their Faber Love Poetry evening coming up on April 7th 2011. Poets including Wendy Cope, Andrew Motion and Clive James will be reading their own and other people’s work spanning poets and poems from the 16th to the 21st century. This is going to be a brilliant event with wonderful poets in the line up. And tickets are most definitely going to sell out. It takes place at the Royal Geographical Society and doors open at 6:15, readings begin at 7pm and will be finished by 8:30. SO, we’ve come up with a little competition for you! Clamour forth all you Wendy Cope fans. (drum roll) Who does Wendy Cope most like to make cocoa for? A) Kingsley Amis Wendy Cope Biography and Bibliography AUTHOR PROFILE Biography Poet Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent in 1945 and read History at St Hilda's College, Oxford.

She trained as a teacher at Westminster College of Education, Oxford, and taught in primary schools in London (1967-81 and 1984-6). She became Arts and Reviews editor for Contact, the Inner London Education Authority magazine, and continued to teach part-time, before becoming a freelance writer in 1986. She was television critic for The Spectator magazine until 1990. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1987 and was awarded the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse (American Academy of Arts and Letters) in 1995. Her poetry collections include Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992) and If I Don't Know (2001), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. She has edited a number of poetry anthologies including The Orchard Book of Funny Poems (1993), Is That The New Moon?

(1989), The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems (1998) and The Faber Book of Bedtime Stories (1999) and Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems (2001). She is also the author of two books for children, Twiddling Your Thumbs (1988) and The River Girl (1991). Wendy Cope is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Winchester, England. In 1998 she was the listeners' choice in a BBC Radio 4 poll to succeed Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate. Her latest book, Two Cures for Love (2008) is a selection of previous poems with notes, together with new poems.

Buy Wendy Cope's books from Blackwells Wendy Cope Reads Across the City Priapus Press (limited edition), 1980 Hope and the 42 Other Branch Readings, 1984 Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis Faber and Faber, 1986 Poem from a Colour Chart of House Paints (limited edition) Priapus Press, 1986 Does She Like Word Games? Anvil Press Poetry, 1988 Men and Their Boring Arguments Wykeham, 1988 Twiddling Your Thumbs Faber and Faber, 1988 Is That the New Moon?

(editor) HarperCollins, 1989 The River Girl Faber and Faber, 1991 Serious Concerns Faber and Faber, 1992 The Faber Book of Drink, Drinkers and Drinking (contributor) Faber and Faber, 1993 The Orchard Book of Funny Poems (editor) Orchard, 1993 The Squirrel and the Crow Prospero Poets, 1994 Poems 1 (contributor) Addison Wesley Longman, 1995 Another Day on Your Foot and I Would Have Died (contributor) Macmillan, 1996 Casting a Spell (contributor) Faber and Faber, 1996 Marigolds Grow Wild on Platforms: An Anthology of Railway Poetry (contributor) Ward Lock, 1996 Over the Moon: Championship Football Poems (contributor) Red Fox, 1996 A Draft of XXX Cantos (contributor) Faber and Faber, 1997 Dear Future: A Time Capsule of Poems (contributor) Hodder & Stoughton, 1997 Evergreen Verse (contributor

) Dent, 1997 For All Occasions (contributor) Methuen, 1997 Funnybones (contributor) CollinsEducational, 1998 Silly Bones (contributor) Scholastic, 1998 The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems (editor) Faber and Faber, 1998 The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes (contributor) Faber and Faber, 1999 The Faber Book of Bedtime Stories (editor) Faber and Faber, 1999 Big Orchard Book of Funny Poems (editor) Orchard, 2000 Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems (editor) Faber and Faber, 2001 If I Don't Know Faber and Faber, 2001 Is That The New Moon?: Poems by Women Poets (selector) Collins, 2002 George Herbert: Verse and Prose (selecton) If you are involved in this festival you can update or change details via the organisers page .

Authors can list here. Review: If I Don't Know by Wendy Cope | Books | The Guardian Buy it at a discount at BOL Wendy Cope's poetry used to be required reading for anyone enduring an unsatisfactory romance or without a love life at all. She may have dreamt of making cocoa for Kingsley Amis, but she served up something more intoxicating to the rest of us. She was funny in an angry, slightly chippy way. I loved her poetic comfort food. I used to recite 'Bloody men are like bloody buses' to myself and friends, which pointed out that you wait and nothing happens and then suddenly several buses / men roll up at the same time. But now she has left the bus stop. Cope's new book is about a more settled life. Once she wrote: 'There are so many kinds of awful men one can't avoid them all.' Now she takes it all (or some of it) back.

These lines were commissioned by the Salisbury Festival to appear in fireworks: 'Write it in fire across the night: Some men are more or less all right.' If I Don't Know is her third collection - the first for more than nine years - and it testifies to doubt and a faltering attitude to her reputation. In 'A Mystery' she disarmingly explains herself: People say, 'What are you doing these days? What are you working on? I think for a moment or two. The question interests me. What am I doing these days? How odd that I haven't a clue. If anyone can dramatise blankness amusingly then Cope can and does. She even writes a poem with the title 'Being Boring' which ends: I don't go to parties. Well, what are they for, If you don't need to find a new lover? You drink and you listen and drink a bit more And you take the next day to recover. Someone to stay home with was all my desire And, now that I've found a safe mooring, I've just one ambition in life: I aspire To go on and on being boring. But the jauntiness cannot disguise her defensiveness.

The 'safe mooring' is not always safe for her poems. Cope enjoys sending poets, including herself, up. Her parodies (of T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth, Seamus Heaney and others) made her name. Remember paunchy, talentless 'Casanova of Tulse Hill'? In 'Reading', she listens to someone who could be his cousin: Everybody in this room is bored. The poems drag, the voice and gestures irk. He can't be interrupted or ignored. It is amusing but does not compete with the poetry reading she survived in her first collection: Don't ask what it was all about I haven't got a clue. I spent a blissful evening, lost In carnal thoughts of you. Something has been lost - and Cope is looking for it. She tries to translate herself into nature poet but the natural world comically refuses to comply. In 'The Squirrel and the Crow' she hopes to derive 'solace' from a walk but instead comes across an unobligingly headless squirrel and a dead crow. When she comes to write nature poems in praise of her garden, her pleasure in what she sees is guarded to the point of flatness.

If I Don't Know is constructed around helplessness in the face of beauty. She seems stunned in more ways than one. 'The rose. The gardenful. The evening light. It's nine o clock and I can still see everything.' She writes like a convalescent. But she - and nature - come up trumps on the subject of different breeds of pig which ends with the unlikely, elegiac words: 'All the golden pigs are gone.' The best poem in the book, 'The Teacher's Tale', takes up almost half of it and was commissioned to mark the six hundredth anniversary of Chaucer's death. I am not sure if Paul is an invented character, but everyone knows someone like him. It starts off in the tone of a Middle England reporter praising Paul's respectable parents. Then it starts to change gear... Cope's protests are worth attending to. She shows that 'respectable' parents are not always good. She was once a primary school teacher herself, and there is informed sympathy in every line. This is an agile, modern Canterbury Tale and the end brought a lump to my throat. I loved 'Stickleback Song', too (also about education).

I won't give its unusual message away here, but it ought to be pinned on the noticeboards of every staff room in England. Wendy Cope: 'My editor says she’d die of shock if she saw me on Twitter' - Telegraph Wendy Cope: 'My editor says she’d die of shock if she saw me on Twitter' The poet Wendy Cope on feminism, her childhood and her addiction to Eastenders Wendy Cope pictured at home in Ely Photo: Jovita Valaityte Follow Wendy Cope, 69, worked for 15 years as a primary-school teacher in London before releasing her first collection of poetry, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, in 1986, which became a bestseller. She has since released numerous collections and edited poetry anthologies, and in 2010 was awarded an OBE. Her latest book, Life, Love and The Archers: Recollections, Reviews and Other Prose, is out now. She lives in Ely with her husband, the poet Lachlan Mackinnon . Daily routine Lachlan and I are both night owls and don’t sleep very well so we get up around 8.30 or 9.

There’s no point getting up if I’m too tired to think. I have fresh coffee with my breakfast, and am at my desk by 10, where I work until it’s time to make lunch. In the afternoon I sometimes have a snooze or do a quick crossword (Lachlan is a crossword fiend, and I’m not allowed to touch the main one) then I’ll go for a walk. In the evenings we watch quite a lot of television and I’ll read. I try to have the light out by midnight. Retail therapy I’m very keen on mail-order shopping – it’s kind of a bad habit. If I have a bit of time, I’ll have a look at what emails I’ve been sent by clothes companies, and buy things. I even bought my wedding dress online. Married life Lachlan and I have been together for more than 20 years but only got married last year. I had feminist reservations about marriage, although the main reason we didn’t do it sooner was that we couldn’t be bothered. But actually we’re happy about it now; it made a big difference in a good way that I can’t quite put my finger on.

We’re also feeling very smug because we spent about £800 on our wedding – not counting the dress. Teddies Roger in the red jumper is mine – I’ve had him since I was one year old – and Bruin is Lachlan’s [pictured]. They spend a lot of time together. Some of the poems in my second book are by Roger; he writes about football. At the time he supported Tottenham but now I have a stepson who is a Southampton supporter so I think Roger has switched. Related Articles 28 Mar 2014 PHOTO: Jovita Valaityte Wedding present This painting [pictured] is by a Cambridge artist called Peter Cavaciuti, who is very influenced by Chinese art, which I also love. Lachlan bought it for me as a wedding present. I hadn’t thought of buying one another wedding presents but Lachlan had, so I bought him a tablet in return. PHOTO: Jovita Valaityte Childhood The first thing I can remember was when my younger sister was born. I was two and a half, and I came in from the garden and saw a carrycot all laid out on the landing. So I jumped into it.

What I really liked to do as a young child was read, especially Enid Blyton and horse stories. Ornaments I travel a lot and collect ornaments from different parts of the world. The big one is from LA and is quite extraordinary – the most vulgar Christmas tree ornament I’ve ever seen. The little straw wheel is from Prague, which is the most beautiful place I’ve visited. I had a whole crib made out of straw but it got eaten by mice. I wrote a poem about the ornaments that starts off, ‘The mice attacked the Holy Family’. PHOTO: Jovita Valaityte Archive Selling my archive to the British Library was jolly hard work but I’m quite glad I did it. I did have to include my diaries, though, which I wanted to keep. I wrote them mostly in the 1980s. I was living on my own and didn’t have anyone to talk to and life was quite difficult, so it was helpful. I stopped when I moved in with Lachlan. Men’s diaries are all ‘went to this church and saw this wonderful statue’. My diaries are like Bridget Jones on speed.

Business and pleasure Lachlan is retired now but he stays upstairs in his study and I’m downstairs in mine. We speak to each on cordless phones (I’m not going to climb two flights of stairs to ask what he wants for lunch) and email, but it’s quite good that there’s that space. PHOTO: Jovita Valaityte Book This book was a gift from my father; I think he gave it to me when I was studying for my English A-level. It’s falling apart but it has an inscription from him in the front so it’s very precious. I didn’t like the poetry we did at school but my father used to recite long poems to us, like The Charge of the Light Brigade. I suppose that must have had some influence. TV addict About three years ago we went for Christmas at Lachlan’s brother’s, and were forced to watch Coronation Street and EastEnders. Embarrassingly, we got addicted. I’m ashamed of it really – I sit there saying, ‘This is ridiculous! Nobody would behave like this!’ I also like University Challenge and got to present the trophy once, which was great. We all went for a pizza afterwards with the producer and Jeremy Paxman.

PHOTO: Jovita Valaityte Lamp This lamp [pictured] was my father’s and was in our house since before I was born. He’d never been to Japan so I don’t know where he got it but he was in the retail trade and a lot of our things were from Harrods, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he bought it there. I don’t know if it’s hideous or not because when things have been part of your life since you were born you can’t really tell. I like it largely for sentimental reasons but also think it’s quite attractive. I feel slightly defensive about it because I wonder if anyone who saw it for the first time would just think, ‘My God.’ Feminism I would call myself a feminist, and I think things have improved, but there are still things that depress me. High heels, for example. The fact that, after all we’ve been through, women are still persuaded to wear those ridiculous shoes just appals me. The idea of young women being against feminists because they think they’re ugly old women also makes me very cross. They’ve benefited from feminists.

PHOTOS: Jovita Valaityte Moneybox An employee of my father’s – an old carpenter – made this moneybox [pictured] for me when I was christened. It has my name and my date of birth on it and seems quite prophetic seeing as I ended up earning my living as a writer. Twitter I won’t have anything to do with it. Some people’s publishers make them do it, but mine have been very good. My editor says she’d die of shock if she saw me on Twitter. Lachlan also says I really musn’t go on it because in certain moods I would say things that would get me in trouble. The blank page It’s depressing to sit in front of a blank page when you’ve got no ideas, or to spend a day working on a poem and realise that it’s no good. But I’ve decided I just have to be brave and even if it is depressing I have to try because if I don’t try, I don’t write anything. Retirement I intend to keep going for as long as I can; writers tend not to retire, they just go gaga. I have no intention of stopping, though. I seem to be stuck with being a poet.

Question: Poet Wendy Cope wrote ‘Making Cocoa For……’who’?
Answer: Kingsley Amis