There’s a pen and ink sketch somewhere of Alliance House, where Carcanet has its office – Carcanet Towers, as I gather it’s called. I can’t find the drawing anywhere now, so of course it glows in my head as a thing of beauty. I remember the impressive facade, the mullioned windows, the grandness of scale and the capacious interior it implied. Somewhere inside that building I liked to imagine the oak-panelled headquarters of PNR, where dozens of people bustle around piles of poems.

I liked the picture because even if that’s a fantasy, it’s a manifestation of what’s really distinctive about PNR: the ambition, the rangey catholic tastes, the internationalism, the way it’s the opposite of parochial. I wanted to be in there, inside that splendid building, roaming its rooms.

At least, that’s what I thought I wanted, but this desire changed into something else as soon as I got a response from Michael to one of my poems. It wasn’t that I didn’t care any more, it was rather that once the conversation started, the possibilities of extending it and opening it up seemed more interesting than simply getting in the door. I’d sent a sort of sonnet where the move in the middle was not so much a turn as a lurch; it had to be like that. I got an email back from Michael: ‘I cannot quite get, though I think I instinctively follow without being able to see how, the transition. Tell me how it works.’ Did that mean my poem had been accepted or not? Wrong question.

In fact I don’t think I’ve ever ...