The job didn’t teach me a great deal about writing, other than the importance of accuracy, brevity and clarity it also taught me, through my reporting of court cases and council meetings, worthwhile lessons about how society ticks. I became a newspaper reporter when I left school, and devoted my spare time to poetry. Falling in love at the age of sixteen (with an older woman – she was twenty-one), together with the music of Bob Dylan and bands like the Rolling Stones and the Pretty Things, the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and a sense of adolescent revolt against school, church, the police, authority in general – all these things stung me into poetry, although I was 24, I suppose, before I wrote a functioning poem. Apart from giving me a valuable insight into the evils of a totalitarian system, my expensive, cheerless education was a waste of time and money.

So the family, from humble beginnings, became wealthily middle-class and did their utmost to deny their Welshness, giving their offspring vapid names like Nigel and sending them to English public schools. On the day of his funeral, 20,000 steel workers across Wales paid their respects to him by standing for five minutes in cap-doffed silence. He was highly intelligent, though, and he worked his way up to becoming a knighted magnate of the steel industry – a remarkable rags-to-riches story. My mother’s family were involved in the steel industry, her grandfather having started his working life as a (rather sickly) mill boy. From about the age of fifteen, if not earlier, I was sure I wanted to be a writer (much to the unease of my poor father, who had assumed I would follow in his footsteps many Welsh farmers have been poets, but I was far too lazy to take to that hard way of life: how I hated carrying hay). I was born in 1949 and raised on a farm in Gower.

And please mention if you’ve been to Patagonia because I keep hearing about it and I’m intrigued. By popular demand we have an interview with poet and haiku practitioner, Nigel Jenkins.ġ)Tell us a bit about yourself.

Real Swansea by Nigel Jenkins