I’m writing this column in Hull, where yesterday I spoke at Bad Habits of Expectancy, a conference at the university to mark the centenary year of Philip Larkin’s birth. It is all very exciting and strange. I have a student room, and this morning I ate my breakfast – properly buttered toast, for I am properly in the north – alongside a handful of bleary-eyed undergraduates in a place called the Pantry. Scarf trailing, I walk the campus, rather bleak in winter, and remember what it was like to be young. Where did all the years go? Larkin, of course, is the perfect soundtrack for this kind of melancholy.
I talked about Larkin and cancel culture: looking back, he was a canary in the coal mine, a sign of things to come. Others have spoken on Larkin and Auden, Larkin and national service (which he did not do), and Larkin and childhood (which famously bored him); Prof Esther Johnson of Sheffield Hallam University and her colleague Vicky Foster delivered a presentation about Hull’s once magnificent 1960s Co-op, a building that, even if it didn’t inspire it, brings to mind Here, Larkin’s gorgeous poem about the city (Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies / Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers).
