Michael is British but he is also Mexican. For a long time he represented the north of England in the BBC’s Round Britain Quiz. A listener once complained to the BBC, asking why the north had to be represented by a Mexican; were there no sufficiently knowledgeable Britons to be found? When Michael received his OBE in 2006 for services to poetry it was after he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Perhaps in anticipation of the current emphasis on diversity, his response was to say that he was changing his name to Schmobe Frsl, ‘a suitable name’, as he put it, for the publisher of such a culturally diverse list. I have called him Schmobe ever since. My admiration and affection for him grow every year, as fast as his beard and my hair grow white.
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