Wendy Cope

At the end of January, I had the honour and pleasure of being on Desert Island Discs. I liked Lauren Laverne and enjoyed talking with her. Afterwards I wondered if I’d been careful enough about what I said. Had I made a fool of myself? As the transmission date approached I was anxious. I told hardly anyone about the programme, in the totally unrealistic hope that people wouldn’t notice it was on. But it was OK. A few things I was worried about had been cut in the edit. The post-broadcast feedback has been amazing. I’ve been on the radio quite a lot over the years. Sometimes I’ve had a couple of messages from friends, sometimes nothing at all.

The palaver about who should be the next Poet Laureate has begun. I hate the way that the serious art of poetry is turned into something like a horse race, with odds at William Hill. In 1998 the press began speculating about the next one before Ted Hughes was buried. I still haven’t forgiven them for that. It’s not as if the matter is urgent. If the Prime Minister dies, we need a new one quickly. But the country could struggle on without a Poet Laureate for quite a while. If any journalists are thinking of asking me who I think it should be, don’t waste your time. I won’t comment, except to confirm that I don’t want the job. A position that I would like is womenswear consultant to Marks & Spencer.

There’s a Christmas poem of mine, written in the 1980s, that ends with the line ‘And the whole business is unbelievably dreadful, if you’re single’. When I read Bridget Jones’s Diary I was interested to find that the central character felt the same, and even more interested to see that Helen Fielding had included my poem. The first thing I did was to check the acknowledgements to make sure that her publishers had asked permission from my publishers. They had. Having established that, I was delighted. I wrote to Helen and got a nice reply. When I heard that there was going to be a film I had high hopes that it might do for me what Four Weddings and a Funeral had done for Auden by including his poem ‘Funeral Blues’.