He tried to endow writing with a mystique it doesn't warrant. Writing is simply talking on paper, but the problem is that most people,when confronted with a blank sheet of paper, try to be clever, and that is their undoing.

To write for a living requires two faculties: something to say, and the craft to say it. Either one without the other is useless.

Having said that, I shall now go on to put myself out of business, in order to draw to your attention to something I have long known but never before mentioned. (Could that be self-preservation?)

I am firmly of the opinion that there are more people not writing who should be writing than there are who are writing and shouldn't be, myself included.

There must be thousands of people in Britain, and less civilised places, who have spent their entire working lives in the wrong job - thousands of bright lights hidden under thousands of bushels.

At this stage you must be wondering what has prompted such blatant honesty on my part, so I will tell you.

There came into my possession the other day a card which one old lady had written concerning her relationship with another old lady. It was written in the form of a poem, but the beauty of it is that the writer has no idea how good she is.

What makes this thing so special is that it conforms precisely to what Dylan Thomas said a poem should do: "Make me FEEL something".

Poetry is the converse of all other industries in life: the harder you try, the more you fail. But when it's right, it reads as though it were carved in stone and had always been there.

I have no idea who this woman is, but I know everything about her. I have no permission to publish her poem and expose it to a million readers.

Nor do I have permission to amend it very slightly, as I have done, in order to make it scan, but not in any way to alter the essence, which is particularly and brilliantly hers.

When you have read this thing, you will know what festering bitterness tastes like, and how it can mellow into a tired, numb acceptance; you will know what it's like when all your future is behind you.

Here it is:

Two old ladies, sitting down to tea,
I'm 84 and she's 83.
I hate her, and she hates me,
But we're the only ones left, you see.

We meet every Wednesday at half-past three,
I go to her place, or she comes to me,
I bore her to death, and she bores me,
But we're the only ones left, you see.

She talks of her Harry, and I of my Fred,
The things that they did and the things that they said,
We both tell lies and never agree,
But we're the only ones left, you see.

She boasts of the party at No. 3,
When my Fred kissed her instead of me,
But I still wear his ring, so it's plain to see
Why I hate her and she hates me.

Never trust your best friend, they say,
And I don't trust her, not to this day.
But they're all gone now, so pour some more tea...
For we're the only ones left, you see.