So I am nineteen years old and don't usually know what I'm doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watching children and animals at play but wouldn't mind seeing a beggar kicked or a little girl run over because it's all experience, dislike myself and sneer at a world less nice and less intelligent than me. I take it this is fairly routine?

'Have you, have you ever fucked a tart who's had a kid?'

'No.' He didn't hear and turned to me, mouth ajar. I shook my head.

'Well I—' he zig-zagged crazily, squeezed between a taxi and a newspaper van, and drifted two-wheeled up Queensway - 'well I fucking have. And it's no joke. Don't know you're there.'

Norman squalled to a roasted halt broadside a zebra-crossing, allowed a dumpy blonde to swank past, and whipped the car forward again, snicking the overcoat buttons and ironing the toecaps of two Siamese dotards.

'Like waving a flag in space.'

More lights. I wanted to ask Norman if he had read Swinburne, but he continued: Their guts flop too. Jen'll be okay for one, maybe more. No, fuck, I said she could adopt some, but - tarts like having babies! Their cunts', he flicked off the heater, 'turn to mush. Tits' - we pulled away - 'smell of bad milk. And they hang. Pancake tits.'

'All right. Now. I want you to do a great deal of hard thinking in the next nine or ten months - I'm going to take you anyway; if I don't, somebody else will and you'll only get worse. Stop reading critics, and for Christ's sake stop reading all this structuralist stuff. Just read the poems and work out whether you like them, and why. Okay ? The rest comes later - hopefully. You'll get the letter in a few days. Tell Leigh to come in, would you?'

This may be bluffing, but I think that one of the dowdiest things about being young is the vague pressure you feel to be constantly subversive, to sneer at oldster evasions, to shun compromise, to seek the hard way out, etc., when really you know that idealism is worse than useless without example, and that you're no better. The teenager can normally detach his own behaviour from his views on the behaviour of others; but I had no moral energy left.