Tonight:
5°c
"Look," the novelist standing next to the buffet said, pointing down the room at the new winner of the 2008 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. "He's on his third helping." He sniggered. "That's poets for you."
Nick Laird - by his own declaration jet-lagged and hung-over, one of which is also an occupational hazard of poetry - did seem to be tucking in. Sad to say, poets even more than other writers need all the free stuff they can get. A memorable short story by Martin Amis imagined a world where screenwriters starved in garrets and poets were flown to LA to premiere their new sonnets. It was memorable because it was so absurd.
Poetry prizes involve white wine, paper napkins and modest cheques, rather than pounding rock music and autocuties in Versace. That makes them all the nicer.
As one of the judges of this year's prize, along with the poets Jo Shapcott and Michael Longley, I helped pick Laird's collection On Purpose to win. I'm proud of that. It's fiercely good and I think will last.
In his acceptance speech, Nick talked about applying as a young man for work experience in the "poetry editing department" of Faber and discovering that the "poetry editing department" consisted of a man, a desk and a pencil.
Once, of course, that man with a pencil was T S Eliot. Faber celebrates its 80th birthday this year, so you can expect to hear from Old Possum from beyond the grave as the months go on. The facts about T S Eliot that stick in my head are that he was an unexpectedly good dancer and that he once put exploding sugar in Virginia Woolf's tea.
* Another writer who, I'd like to think, would stoop to the exploding sugar gag is Geoff Dyer. Funny writer. Funny title: Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi. Funny novel. Or sort-of novel - he hops back and forth over the fiction/non-fiction divide like a knock-kneed hurdler.
Talking at his book launch on Wednesday, he told the story of how his wife had once said to him: "I don't know how you do it." Geoff braced himself for an adoring expression of wonder at the creative process. "I mean, you're incapable of making anything up but you don't NOTICE anything "
* I find it hard to imagine that Guantánamo Bay is, as Miss Universe Dayana Mendoza claimed in her blog, "a relaxing, calm, beautiful place", still less "a loooooot of fun". But it's quite wrong that her blog should have been removed from the pageant's website. Have the organisers of Miss Universe never read Voltaire? Index on Censorship (too often saddled with unphotogenic old dissidents with beards) should seize the moment and adopt comely Miss Mendoza as their poster girl.
