11 DECEMBER 1993, Page 43

Singing Bird

Good God, poor Septimus, stop all this praise. You make me seem a vase in some museum. Goodbye the living poet, hello the mausoleum! I haven't written an unselfconscious phrase since you phoned in the small hours, raving about my last sent verses, lyrical sparrows daftly denying the empirical hawk and its usual method of behaving.

I cannot write a word now but I visualise myself an admired object, in your aesthetic gallery of plinth-set poets, caretaken for a salary, whose golden dung brings tears to aesthetes' eyes. I'm out into the day to let the rain batter me back to dailiness again.