Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson

I have found an excellent new way to annoy my family.

My teenage children found my old method, baroque ukulele, exquisitely irritating. Whenever I started plucking at a sweet air, something like Pastime and Good Company by Henry VIII or My Lord Willoughby’s Welcome Home by John Dowland, I would hear loud groans and the closing of doors.

The ukulele has gone back into its case. My new antisocial, room-clearing hobby is reading poetry aloud. I’ve been encouraged in this pursuit by my friend the actor Sir Timothy Ackroyd, Bt, who trod the boards alongside Peter O’toole in the stage play of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell in the eighties. He now earns a crust by teaching Russians to speak good English.

Reading poetry aloud is an excellent lockdown distraction. It’s something I hadn’t done since school, when each pupil would read a few lines of the poem or play under discussion. What a lovely custom!

Sir Tim and I are starting with some family favourites. My first assignment was Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Sir Tim tries to get me to imagine the scene in my mind while I’m reading. ‘I want to feel the snow!’ he says. Truth be told, I find the poem a little boring and pointless and can’t really understand why it’s considered to be so great. I prefer the jauntier Sea Fever by John Masefield, with its bouncing refrain, ‘I must go down to the seas again!’

While intoning these words, I try to keep a percussive beat and I bring to mind the wild shores of the Isle of Eigg where I spent many holidays in my teens and twenties.

I read both poems out loud at home. To me, it’s a win-win: I get to fulfil long-abandoned actor fantasies and to practise – and the smaller mice get educated, even if my readings evoke their howls of derision.

I pressed on and was glad when Sir Tim set me Diary of a Church Mouse by John Betjeman. Being a mouse myself, I identified with the protagonist, though he is a rather prim and judgemental mouse, who disapproves of visits to the church by heathen, fun-loving fieldmice.

My daughter was polite enough to say, ‘Ah, sweet!’ when I read it to her in the kitchen.

The two boys prefer playing computer games. This depresses me enormously. They spent too much time staring at screens before lockdown. Now the evil geniuses of Silicon Valley are profiting from lockdowns by mediating education and play. Oh, for the old days, when all you needed was a book, a blackboard and a piece of chalk!

I would love to gather my children round me after dinner and read stories to them by the fire. And for them to appreciate it. As it is, we depend far too much on the slick offerings of Netflix for our evening entertainment.

Would it not be better to listen to Father reading aloud and make the images in your own mind? And indulge his submerged thespian tendencies? Even if he is not particularly talented?

I’m now hunting for other mousethemed poems. There is To a Mouse, on Turning Up in Her Nest with the Plough by Robert Burns. The accent might prove tricky.

I ought to get some tips from my pal the strolling player Dominic West. He has kindly written the preface for the new edition of an old book of mine about country living (see page 13).

He says he was so inspired by my praise of rural life that he sold up in Shepherd’s Bush and moved to Wiltshire. This disappointed me as I had just moved back to Shepherd’s Bush from Devon, following 12 years of keeping hens and digging potatoes.

‘Hang on, Tom,’ he said at the time. ‘You told us to move to the country and now you’re back in town!’

Still, West’s move to the country does not appear to have slowed down his career and I’m very much looking forward to seeing him as Uncle Matthew in the new TV adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love this spring.

My children will be relieved to hear that I’ll be happy to put my own poetry book aside for a few evenings and see how the pros do it.

‘Reading poetry aloud is an excellent lockdown distraction’