Rory - can you remember where your impulse to write first came from?
When I was maybe ten, we had to go out into the grounds of our little village primary school in Lincolnshire and look at catkins on trees, and then go and write poems about them. And whatever mawkish crap I produced as a result of this to some extent impressed my teacher, which was quite rewarding - I was a bit of a naughty kid. So I had a sense early on that I was quite good at playing around with words. I liked making up rhymes and daydreaming a lot, and maybe being an only child helped.

My dad was a poet - we didn’t live together. I was born in Ireland and my mum left my dad when I was two, and she moved with me to Lincolnshire, to her mum’s house. So I grew up with my grandma and my aunt and my mum, in a small three bedroom house, a lodge house of an estate. I was very much on my own in a way, but I was also aware of that world of writing from an early age. I’m not very good at anything else! So, writing and thinking about things was sort of my forte.

You’ve called your latest collection ‘Come Here To This Gate’  - what sort of things were occupying your thoughts as you wrote it?
My copies arrived in the post today - I popped downstairs to make a cup of coffee, and there they were. I’ve not really seen them yet. I mean, I’d seen the poems. I wrote them. And I’m quite glad to see that it’s not all printed upside down or something.

My last book was published four years ago - what normally happens is that I finish a book of poems and don’t write any for a while, until something shakes me back towards poetry. And for this book, that was becoming a writer in residence in Bucheon, South Korea, in 2020. The first two weeks were spent in quarantine in a hotel in Seoul - my duty was to write about the Korean border, in various ways. I had a fascinating time, and being in that situation kickstarted me back into writing poems.

The book’s title is a quotation from someone who’s certainly no hero of mine. It’s Ronald Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate speech - you know, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall’. Before that, he says ‘Mr. Gorbachev, come here to this gate’. The poem with that name moves from one part of the world to another, looking at people who are stuck behind borders - so, a kid in Derry in the 1970s, who’s inside the ‘peace rings’, they were called - it’s barbed wire, curfewed. Another part looks at two East Germans who designed and made a hot air balloon to fly across the border. They sewed together bits of taffeta and made a basket…then, eventually they told their children they were all going and they all climbed into this hot air balloon in the forest. The first time, they didn’t make it over the border. But the second time they did.

How do you think the collection comes together as a whole?
The book has three main sections: it begins with a sequence called ‘All But Forgotten’, which is in memory of my dad, who passed away in 2022 - he had a terrible last thirteen months or so, he had cancer but also alcohol-induced dementia. The second section looks at borders, metaphorical and literal, some set in Albania and Korea, and some about the condition of England, you could say.

In the third, I play a bit fast and loose with the narratives of four Lincolnshire folk tales - I wanted to make things that were scandalous fun, I’ve moved them about a bit. I hope they piss off some folklorists! Who tend to be quite serious about preserving a tradition that I don’t think should be kept in aspic. Those are the three constituent parts, and the title speaks to all three of them, I think, in different ways.

You wear another hat as an Associate Professor at Nottingham Trent University, where you lead the Creative Writing MA. How much of creativity is down to nature, do you think, and how much is nurture?

Hmm. You can’t inherently teach talent - you’re not God, you can’t make that spark - but you can cultivate it, and a lot of people have a lot more potential than they realise. It’s not wholly innate, because that would imply that for anyone with a bit of talent, that anything that comes out of their quill, their chalk, their fingertips will be golden, and everyone would be mad for not reading it, and that’s just not true.

You can be taught to harness and develop your own talent, to develop interests, to put together a manuscript so that it shines, how to be your best critic - which doesn’t always mean your harshest critic, although it can. And how to have confidence in the process.

What might you say to writers who are just starting their journeys?
Take yourself seriously, take your time. And take risks.

Rory Waterman’s collection Come Here To This Gate is available from Carcanet Press.

For centuries before Mary’s water broke, the only parts of Christmas that existed were fire and mistletoe, and so the festive season mainly consisted of druids French-kissing enthusiastically on the nearest Henge. 

Britain has come a long way since then. Christmas now is a little calmer and cosier - it is the season of runny noses, drunken sellotaping and the sound of carols, which are for some reason mostly about sheep. While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night. The Lamb. All I Want For Christmas Is Ewe. Of all the animals, the sheep is the most Christmassy, surpassing the reindeer, the turkey and even the little non-unionised donkey called in to do a Christmas Eve shift. 

Long before Christianity was English, it was Syrian - the Syrians penned some of the first Christmas number ones, including a hymn by the 4th century writer Saint Ephrem that begins, promisingly: ‘behold, the firstborn has opened his Feast-Day for us like a treasure house’. The chorus is an ancient reminder to set your burglar alarms: ‘it is a great disgrace if one sees his neighbour carrying away treasures’. It’s not got quite the same punch-the-air quality as Fairytale of New York, I’ll grant you, but it does attempt to reduce crime in a way that The Pogues would have found beneath them.

You will notice however that Saint Ephrem’s hymn rarely makes it onto the setlist of the shivering churchgoers who’ll come knocking at your door this year, and that’s because, in a fit of anti-commercial hubris, he refused to mention even a single sheep.

Benjamin Franklin said that a man can die at twenty five and not be buried until he is seventy five. Funeral companies have come on leaps and bounds since then. 

But I also think that he was trying to say that a lot of people become adults, like what they see, and stay there forever. They live their lives like a football team that goes up by two goals in the first twenty minutes and proceeds to have eleven men squat behind the ball, or hog possession near the corner flag, until the final whistle. Life’s a victory in that case, but it’s not much of a game.

Every single one of us is ageing, and when we’re doing something particularly boring, like circumnavigating Nuthall roundabout, taking our stepmother to be dry-cleaned or trying to stay awake while reading this column, we can feel that sense of getting older with a particularly stinging remorse.

Should we mature, or should we keep our puppy fat? Ageing is no guarantee of maturity. We’ve all met seventeen year olds who could be arms inspectors for the UN, and sixty year olds who’d need eagle-eyed supervision to be allowed to operate a small whoopee cushion. 

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche reckoned that we should try to fuse the impulses of two ancient Greek gods within us: Apollo, who was sort of a Head Boy figure, and Dionysos, who is more like the guy who tries to sell you Buckfast behind the sports hall. Apollo or Dionysos, settling down, or living it up? Slippers or skinny-dipping? We can have it all, thought Nietzche, but then he did end up with quite a lot of syphilis.

Time waits for no man, as I discovered most viscerally when I left my SEIKO watch on the 28 to Bilborough. As the pink double-decker sailed out of view, I tried out all sorts of expletives to little effect - time is a big thing, too big to cram into language.

Like so many abstract concepts, the way we convert time into words is by using spatial metaphors: in English we face the future, we look forward (we hope) to the times that are ahead of us, and this all seems sensible and kosher.

But time is more vertical in China, where the past is above and the future is below. ‘Up month’, they say, meaning ‘last month’. The Yangtze river, academics tell us, may be responsible - people associate time with the flow of water downriver.

And it’s all back-to-front for the Aymara people in the Andes, who like to keep things interesting. They call the future the qhipa uru - the back days - because what’s to come is unseeable. In the salt flats of the Altiplano Plateau, the future is behind them and they are facing the past.

I did find my SEIKO eventually, on the thick red arm of a bartender in a flat-roof-pub on Radford Boulevard. Many years had passed and I thought I had let it go, but if you are an English speaker, the past has a way of sneaking up on you.

I was lucky enough to get two back-to-back interviews with Henry Normal, each one better than the last. Henry is an esteem-magnet: writer of The Royle Family, producer of Alan Partridge and a raft of the best British TV comedies, beloved Nottingham-born poet.

Twenty minutes into our chat, having solved most of the world’s mysteries, I have to let him know that my recording has only been picking up my questions and not his answers. Could we please start again from the top? Henry, calling in from a motel in Pocklington on his travels, laughs graciously. I bang my head against the table and call back, the conversation is away again.

So, you started writing poetry in your teens - did that give you some street cred and social cachet or was it a bit uncool back then?
When I was eleven, my mum died in a car crash and I was living in Bilborough, council estate, the skinheads were about, so you know it was quite a rough sort of place. Very withdrawn. I got into poems through comedy, I loved Monty Python and Morecambe and Wise and things like that. I got into Spike Milligan and then I discovered the Liverpool poets, Roger McGough, Brian Patton, and Adrian Mitchell.

Spike Milligan brought out a book of poems called Small Dreams of a Scorpion. I thought it was a comedy, but it was actually a book of serious poems and it made me cry. And I remember thinking he's so funny and yet it can make me cry, and I thought that's what I want to do. 

So when other kids were out playing football, I was sat in my bedroom with a... I didn't have a typewriter or anything in them days, so I did it longhand with a piece of paper and a pen. And it wasn't till I was about nineteen that I joined the Angel Row Writers, right in the centre of Nottingham…

That was at the Central Library?
Yeah, I met other working-class writers. Before that I was sort of on my own and I didn't really know any of the people that wrote. Nobody would write outside school, you know. At Angel Row there were lots of people doing different things. There was a chap called Barry Heath who wrote a play called Me Mam Says, which is a very Nottingham play.

He was well established at the time.
Yeah, and so it made me feel like you could be working class and a writer. Because all the images you got were, you know, sort of old blokes in tweed with pipes, weren't they? And...

Never fancied the tweed.
Never fancied the tweed. Not for a goth. They had a Christmas do and I was asked to get up and read a poem, and people laughed. I was hooked. There's something lovely about performing in front of an audience ‘cause all the middlemen, all the people that you have to get past that don't understand where you're coming from, are out. It's just you and what you want to communicate and the people in front of you. It's all about communicating. And I've still got stuff that I want to communicate.

I find it quite beautiful, the idea of celebrating our humanity with comedy and poetry and other forms of communication. It's something you can't get with AI

So performance for you is about that communication?
I read Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious when I was a teenager. And it talks about the way humour helps us to come to terms with the fact that we're all imperfect.

And I think what's beautiful about that, that we are all imperfect. I saw a psychiatrist when my son was born. It was hard coming to terms with the fact that he was severely autistic and would never leave home, never have a job and never have a girlfriend. And we went to the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist said, ‘everybody has the same problem’. And I thought that's a bit odd. And the psychiatrist said, ‘everybody thinks that they're not good enough’. 

So I think about Freud and the idea that comedy helps us come to terms with that. I find it quite beautiful, the idea of celebrating our humanity with comedy and poetry and other forms of communication. It's something you can't get with AI. If you think about it, the thing that AI is most shit at is jokes. Right if you type into AI ‘write me a joke’ all it’ll do you is puns.

That sounds very similar to my own sense of humour. So, it may overtake me.
I like a pun, but I'm sure you work on different levels. There's a human element to communication and I think AI has not mastered that. And AI is not imperfect. AI is just building on things that have already been written. But maybe humour relies on the unexpected…

Also, it involves what's not there. If you ask AI for jokes about bees right, you ask and it’ll say, ‘Oh, one bee says to his partner bee “I love you honey”’. It won’t give you this joke that I heard when I was seven in a schoolyard. A man goes into a shop and he says, ‘I'd like to buy a bee please’. A shopkeeper says, ‘We don't sell bees’. And he says, ‘Well, you've got one in the window’.

We fill in the blanks very often with poetry and comedy as a communication. You don't put it all down literally. You leave gaps for people to bring themselves to it. And there's lots of... I'll tell you another joke, just to illustrate it.

Absolutely!
So a man is in court. And the judge says to him, ‘How do you plead?’, and he says, ‘I plead innocent’. And the judge says, ‘But you were caught exposing yourself’. And he says ‘No, no, no, I was making love to my wife’. And he says ‘That's ridiculous, making love to…your wife's dead’. 

He says, ‘I know, I was making love to a ghost’. ‘You were making love to a ghost?’ And the judge turns to the courtroom and he says, ‘Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? Has anybody here ever made love to a ghost?’ 

A man at the back puts his hand up, and the judge says, ‘You've made love to a ghost?’ And the man at the back says ‘oh, sorry, I thought you said goat’. 

I don’t think ChatGPT would understand the goat.
No, AI can’t do that. The essence of that joke is the man has embarrassed himself and it's nothing to do with ghosts. There's constructions in humour and constructions in the way we communicate that AI doesn't get. 

You need the experience of living to be able to apply that.
Yeah! And to understand embarrassment, to get that. We laugh because we go, ‘Oh hell’. I'm not too worried about AI. I know in America there's striking, all the stuff with face recognition, that’s horrible, but just in terms of creativity I don't think - we'll use the word ‘yet’ - I don't think that AI is going to overtake any writers. 

That’s a modern concern. Are there any pressing topics you’d still like to get round to?
I think they’ve got to affect you personally, I think if you start saying, ‘Oh I’ll try to write about a particular crisis in the world’ it becomes false, it might as well be AI.

You've got to filter it through yourself. So what I tend to write is things where I have a reaction to them and I'll try to communicate what my reaction is. Sometimes it's it’s where you see the irony. We show that the emperor's got no clothes. One of the jobs of comedians and poets is to say, ‘Have you noticed this?’ 

You also see patterns. I'm in my sixties now, so I've seen some of the lies that the politicians tell, I've seen them tell the same lie again and again and again. So you see things, and if you point out those things, then it gives more context to the moment. So yeah, I think poetry and comedy, they both have a sense of rhythm to them. 

And that poetic rhythm, when you moved on to screenwriting and producing TV, did you take that to the rest of your work?
I hope so. It's funny isn't it, poetry is such a huge word. A poem on the other hand is a very small thing. It's contained, you know, it's like a small plot of land. It's not the wild of the universe. 

And if we talk about poetry, I would hope that there's a sense of poetry that I've brought to everything that I've been involved with. A sense of the values of I was brought up with as a working class lad and you know, I think Nottingham has a great sort of tradition of directness, friendliness and honesty that I hope I've brought into all the different places I've worked and lived throughout my life.

You're back with us in Nottingham soon, at Metronome on 3 October. How do you feel about the live shows?
I think the best thing about being live is you're with other human beings and no two performances are ever the same. And certainly with Nottingham audiences, people get involved, you can feel it, and it comes out in your performance. It’s a bit like football.

When I used to play football as a kid, I didn’t think about the future or the past, I was in the moment. I just enjoyed the game, the use of your body. I think there’s a similar thing when you’re performing poetry. Everything outside the room, that's not your concern, your concern is that moment in the room.

That reminds me of Alan Sillitoe’s Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, when the character Smith is jogging. He stops running at the finish line, he’s doing it not to win but because it's his state of mind, it's that clear-headedness and being in the present.

I just want to mention that is the seminal book of my life. It’s the image that stays with you. Better to fail on your own terms than on other people's - it took me a while to understand that’s why he stops running. But as soon as I did, I've been walking to the finish line ever since. 

Garrison’s first passion was photography. He worked part time as a cinema projectionist in Clapham Junction, splicing together broken reels, and with the keen eye he’d developed he soon went on to become a medical photographer at Guy’s Hospital, while the West Indian Gazette regularly published his photojournalism. At London’s Institute of Psychiatry he soon spearheaded the new Medical Illustration Unit, documenting the variety of troubled minds that existed in the capital of the Sixties.

Garrison’s focus soon moved from photography to education and he earned a BA in African and Caribbean history, as well as an MA in local history. In 1971, he took a diploma in development studies at Ruskin College, Oxford, where he wrote a dissertation on the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica. Educated at a Chelsea grammar school and having gone on to reach the pinnacle of British academia at Oxford, Garrison couldn’t escape the conclusion that other young black people were being failed within Britain’s schools: "given the right opportunity,” he said “[black children] can become an asset to society.”

Finding the means to address this would soon become the main resolve of Garrison’s life. He co-founded the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton and, while working on his PhD, established the Afro-Caribbean Education Resource, ACER, becoming its first director. One of ACER’s several projects was the Young Penmanship award for creative writing, success in which was a huge spur onwards for the careers of many black writers, including The Times’ current chief theatre critic Clive Davis. ACER’s black history educational packs were piloted in Brixton, and these were soon distributed in schools all over the country.

Garrison reminds us what can be done with a camera, a typewriter and a restless sense of conviction

Len Garrison was a man of scrutiny and sureness. “Every black activist knew him,” writes the novelist Mike Phillips, “because he would turn up everywhere, taking photographs, making notes and collecting documents… he devoted himself to uniting the black diaspora.” Garrison moved again to Nottingham in 1988, taking up the role of Director of ACFF, Afro-Caribbean Family and Friends. Here in Notts, he established East Midlands African Caribbean Arts, as well as Build, one of the first effective mentoring projects in the country. Not easily satisfied, he persuaded the King's Fund to back Timeout, a scheme for supporting the carers of orphaned and abandoned black children. He was instrumental in exposing the story of George Africanus, a former black slave who became a successful businessman in eighteenth century Nottingham.

Garrison’s single book of poetry, Beyond Babylon, written in 1983, gives an elusive impression of the man behind the words. “All is not lost,” he writes, “I have breath and the will to change my state of decay.” His determination was that black history would not be relegated to the marginalia of the history of our nation, and the goal of this pursuit seems much closer now than when his career began. Len Garrison reminds us what can be done with a camera, a typewriter and a restless sense of conviction

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But literary birthdays are no less charged. The Wiener Zeitung published its final edition on its 320th birthday this year, having been able to boast until then that it was the world's longest continually running newspaper. Its reportage had prospered through foul weather and fair, through several Republiks and Reichs, a fact which I would have been more tempted to brush under the rug, but it had finally run out of Zeit. The UK’s longest running magazine is The Spectator, having first rolled off the press in 1828 - and if you want to marvel at how people thought about the world in 1828, and how backwards it all seems, I urge you to pick up the latest issue.

Yes, as publications age they gain the heft of authority, and so it’s a great pleasure to start writing for LeftLion as we celebrate its 20th. This is the time to shake off the heady teenage ways, the stolen kisses in Rob’s Records, the evenings on careering mopeds throwing empty cans of Monster energy at local dignitaries. Let’s buck our ideas up now and get serious. Or maybe next year

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Some fictional booksellers, like Graham Linehan's Bernard Black, are written as devoted misanthropes. Do you find that running an indie bookshop challenges your faith in people - or does it restore it?
Ah, save for a few minutes, I've never watched Bernard Black. I might be grumpy the odd time - who isn't? - but if you were misanthropic, why would anyone come to your shop? Normally I am, of course, all sweetness and light. I do have faith in our customers and am fascinated to see what they read, what they order, and what they do with their lives.

Have you had any favourite encounters with those customers? Bookshops seem to attract characterful people.
Actually, the best encounter was the day after a disaster. We have many customers whose origins are not originally from round here, and customers who are from round here but see themselves as active citizens of the world. Our staff were very clear about our attitude to Brexit, and we held an event asking our customers to read something in any European language they liked, including English. People came and read in German, Spanish, Italian, Irish, English and other languages under the banner "We're Not Leaving". But we lost that vote. The day after, staff put the kettle on, bought biscuits and re-arranged the shop putting chairs out - people poured in to share in the misery, to console themselves. Only now do we see how important that Brexit decision was. The shop remains committed to Europe, and to welcoming the stranger. We think most of our customers share that attitude. Most booksellers do as well.

I always come away with the impression that having that social mission is central to Five Leaves' existence: you have sections for environment, Black writers, LGBTQ+ and many more. How did the course of your life make you want to run a radical bookshop?
Our trade association, the Booksellers Association (BA), has a grant scheme for bookshops making environmental improvements and a few years ago, during Earth Strike Day, we closed, with our staff attending the Extinction Rebellion demonstration on full pay! During the summer in the wake of the murder of George Floyd - though bookshops were shuttered due to Covid - many indies put up Black Lives Matters window displays. Similarly, many indies had Pride window displays during Pride month - and some, in Abergavenny and Abingdon (for example) had quite a bit of pushback, but had the full support of the BA. In short, we are running with the tide of independent bookselling. We just maybe go a little bit further than some.

As to what led me to do it... I worked in bookselling before, in Mushroom Bookshop from 1979 to 1995 (it closed in 2000) and always wanted to have another go. Five Leaves Bookshop is, I suppose, a Mushroom Bookshop for modern times. As to bookselling... I trained as a librarian and a community worker. Maybe bookselling involves a bit of both. We've started using the phrase "changing the world, one book at a time" a little. Perhaps that's a mission statement.

We are running with the tide of independent bookselling. We just maybe go a little bit further than some

Let's say I'm a ruffian who could do with being changed one book at a time. What life-changing books have you been pressing into people's hands recently?
Of course, a ruffian has to want to be changed. But at the very least, this pile of books [pictured] will entertain, educate, open up the world...there's everything from images of women in art, to Nottingham gay life in the bad old days to speculative literature... and my favourite (I'm Scottish) - short stories from the Scottish diaspora in Canada. Read these 21 books and you will be a ruffian no longer. Or a better ruffian, possibly.

Thanks for your time Ross, it's been lovely to chat - congratulations for a remarkable ten years. What have you got in mind for the years to come?
Years to come? Well, it's hard to see beyond this autumn, where we have the usual wide range of events.... a Reading Proud day again, a Quaker and other faiths' seminar on racial justice are standouts. On the publishing side - which has been going since 1995 - we're bringing out a set of short stories set in Derby. Will anybody in Nottingham ever speak to us again?