"Water! Water! Everywhere!" yells a voice across the darkness.
I'm wending my way down the Portobello Road. It is past midnight, and well past my bedtime.
"And all the boards did shrink!"
The voice echoes from the caverns of the Mau Mau club. Aha! I recognise it from long ago. It's Daisy Freckles – an alumna.
She emerges, giggling onto the street.
"Nor any drop to drink – eh, sir!"
We do clumsy high fives.
Daisy Freckles! A sometime Riot Girl and Clash fan…
One of the scant perks of being a raving dotard is meeting such alumni. After yonks in the local comp, this street seems like a village. Generations have endured my lessons, generations have called me sir. It puzzles passers by. Who am I? The lord of Ladbroke Grove? A local mafia don? Sam "The Man" Coleridge? Or the Ancient Mariner himself?
Some of year 7s were unsure. It's my fave poem and it was my star classroom turn. I did it with the tots of year 7 for decades. They could not choose but hear.
This was, of course, BNC – before the national curriculum – when pupils were regarded as human beings, not measurable outcomes, and poetry could simply be relished.
We once built a boat with a year 10 class. Attila Dervish, in the interests of research, went fishing in Kensal Rise canal. Sniffing glue off his cuffs, the clot caught a pram, got tugged in, and nearly sank. Dervish, the Idiot Mariner! Still, he's presently flourishing and is sometimes given to bellowing bits of Coleridge at me, when I pass his fruit stall.
Above all, I made the tots learn the poem by heart. Great, nourishing chunks of it. Just like my old teacher, the legendary "Min" Hills forced us do. Poetry, for Min, was as serious as your life – especially the "Tomorrow" speech from Macbeth. He read the nihilist, pitch-dark lines in his gravest tones.
"You may find this useful in later life," said the grim sage. "Learn it!"
We did. It was. I've often sought its solace, when a Govian new wheeze seems "a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing".
These days poetry seems little more than exam fodder in a meretricious meritocracy, its magic savagely shrunk. All we can do is just pass it on and learn it by heart. It works. Poetry – and song – can last for life.
"As idle as a painted ship!" goes Daisy.
"Upon a painted ocean!" goes I. Then wander off, a happier and wiser man, down the streets of Ladbroke Grove.
• Are there fragments of poetry or song that have helped you through the trickier times in life?
