The Good Listening To Show: Stories of Distinction & Genius

National Treasure, Children's Author & Poet Michael Rosen on Surviving a 40 Day & 40 Night Covid Coma: An Extraordinary Story of Resilience, Survival & Optimism

• Chris Grimes - Facilitator. Coach. Motivational Comedian

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It's National Treasure Day here in 'The Good Listening To Show' as we welcome the incomparable, the legendary, the warm & wonderful Children's Author & Poet, Mr "Chocolate Cake" himself, Michael Rosen! Or as his globally renowned viral Meme would exclaim "Nice!" (Just Google 'Michael Rosen , Chocolate Cake & Meme' and all will become clear!)

With his Willy-Wonka-esque-ex-chocolate-factory office for his 'Clearing' (how perfect!), Michael welcomes us warmly into his world and into his glorious mindscape, as we riff together on a whole array of profound and poignant stories.

You can also Watch/Listen to Michael's episode here:
https://vimeo.com/chrisgrimes/michaelrosen

Described as “an optimistic nihilist” by his graduate daughter Elsie, Michael Rosen is a performance poet, professional broadcaster and abundant author of literally scores of different books, mostly for children but many for adult readers also, with nearly 200 books and 130 million YouTube hits to his name.

Above all, he is an extraordinary survivor. Aged 20, his latent hypothyroidism remained undetected for a potentially deadly decade. In his seventies, the treatment of his severe Covid required a medically induced coma, which in practice kept him unconscious in Intensive Care for 40 days - like a latter day Lazarus in his clinical cave. Now Michael Rosen has less than perfect hearing in one ear and less than perfect vision in one eye. 

Michael Rosen’s parents were both teachers. They spoke Yiddish as well as English and lived quite happily and quite colourfully in a flat above a shop in Pinner. Michael recently collected a nodular pebble from the now largely tarmac area behind the shop to remind him of his early childhood. In those days, his very bright older brother Brian, now a distinguished palaeontologist, took it on himself to teach young ‘Mick’ the basics of calculus or whatever he, Brian, was being taught at school. Michael Rosen was ‘porous’, he says, from an early age!

In an era of dip pens, inkwells & blotting paper, a teacher called Mr Brown arrived from Manchester - in suede shoes! Thanks to this one and only Barry Brown, young Mick was soon inspired by plays and playwrights. He appeared on stage whenever he was offered a part, however minor and later the now published author Michael went on to write some plays of his own!

On a darker note, Michael’s own teenage son Eddie died one April night, suddenly and shockingly, albeit thank goodness, painlessly.  Every year Michael and his now extended  family commemorate Eddie’s premature death and celebrate his short life over a lunch. Death may not have worn ‘creaky boots’ but the Rosens can raise a glass and a smile regularly to remember the one they all lost so unexpectedly…

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Tune in next week for more stories of 'Distinction & Genius' from The Good Listening To Show 'Clearing'. If you would like to be my Guest too then you can find out HOW via the different 'series strands' at 'The Good Listening To Show' website.

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Thanks for listening!

Chris Grimes:

Hello, this is Chris Grimes, curator and host of the Good Listening to Show Stories of Distinction and Jedus, delighted to tell you that there's a brand new website for the show, wwwthegoodlisteningtoshowcom. If you'd like to be my guest too and join the Genius Club, see what I'm doing there then take a look at the website and have a look at the very series strands there are five in all about how you can be my guest too. Let's check out wwwthegoodlisteningtoshowcom. On with the show.

Chris Grimes:

Welcome to another episode of the Good Listening to Show your life and times with me, chris Grimes, the storytelling show that features the clearing, where all good questions come to get asked and all good stories come to be told, and where all my guests have two things in common they're all creative individuals and all with an interesting story to tell. There are some lovely storytelling metaphors a clearing, a tree, a juicy storytelling exercise called 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, some alchemy, some gold, a cheeky bit of Shakespeare and a cake. So it's all to play for. So, yes, welcome to the Good Listening to Show your life and times with me, chris Grimes, are you sitting comfortably here? Then we shall begin. Oh, yes, indeed. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to National Treasure Day here in the Good Listening to Show clearing. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome the incomparable, the legendary Mr Chocolate Cake himself. Michael Rosen is in the clearing.

Michael Rosen:

Hello, hello. Thank you very much for having me here in the clearing in Castered.

Chris Grimes:

Land. It's lovely. Yes, and you're a meme as well. My son just told me 10 minutes ago. Oh yeah, don't forget to mention the meme.

Michael Rosen:

So what would you do? The thing that is the meme to begin the show. Well, the meme goes something like this Nice, there you go. That is the meme.

Chris Grimes:

And that has gone completely viral global and it was from your film about chocolate cake. I mean, is my assumption?

Michael Rosen:

Not quite. It's actually about a scene around my dinner table at home. We're sitting around eating and my brother's blowing on the potato because it's a bit hot. Till, it's cool, just cool, into the mouth, nice. And there's my mum doing the same Till, it's cool, just cool, into the mouth, nice. But my dad, my dad, what does he do? He stuffs a great big chunk of potato into his mouth and that really does it. His eyes pop out, he blows, he puffs, he yells, he bobs, his head up and down, he even spits, spits a potato onto the plate. Sorry about this. And then he turns to us and says watch out everybody, the potatoes really hot. We knew that, didn't we? But he didn't.

Michael Rosen:

Anyway, that little bit, the nice has become a meme. I am known throughout the world as the nice guy, and even in China I'm known as nice grandpa, because Chinese people are very respectful, very respectful towards old geezers like me. In fact, they don't call us old geezers, they call us grandpa. So if you are an old geezer like me, they come up to you in the street and say grandpa, but because of the nice meme, I am nice grandpa. Or in Mandarin, if there are any Mandarin speakers out there, nice, yeah, yeah, I'm going to get a t-shirt. Nice, yeah, yeah, why not?

Chris Grimes:

And isn't that extraordinary? All the extraordinary works that you've done 140 books, tier name, 55 million views on YouTube with your wonderful channel.

Michael Rosen:

Oh, no, no, I can see that we're now 132 million views. Oh yeah, oh gorgeous, isn't it so?

Chris Grimes:

we shatter that record. Yeah, wonderful. And also, by the way, I have here in my hand a piece, not a piece of paper, but a book. This is yours, called Centrally Heated Knickers, that you signed to my daughter, lily, and this book is circa 2000, I think, but that you signed earlier.

Michael Rosen:

And it's got a poem in it that goes I glide as I ride in my boogie woogie buggy. Take the corners wide, just see me drive. I'm an easy, speedy baby doing the baby buggy drive. Yes, I'm in and out the shops. I'm the one that never stops. I'm the one that feels the beat of the wheels, all that air in my hair. I'm the one that I streak down the street between the feet that I meet. I streak down the street between the feet that I meet. No one can catch my boogie woogie buggy. No one's got the pace. I rule this place.

Chris Grimes:

And there's a bit more Well, thus proving that you wrote it, because that was an extraordinary memory call, just straight off the bat. There, we didn't talk about this before, so thank you very much for already giving us Alchemy and Gold in the form of a poem from Michael Rosen Just a tiny bit more happy smoke. You are the incomparable. You're a children's author, I know you know this, but I've just got to put a bit of happy smoke. So I'm also pulling you into the UK health radio space, by the way, as well, which goes global. So you're the children's author, poet, presenter, political columnist. I know you do a monthly open letter to the Minister of Education about the state of education because of your passion for helping children and the power of language. All that's your blank, and I'm a political activist. I've already said how many books you've written and congratulations. I thought it's 55 million hits, but it's not.

Michael Rosen:

it's 142, 132 million. Yes, I think so. That's right. Yes, and I think it's more books than that. I think now there are books with my name on coming to something like 200, so I can't put up with myself.

Chris Grimes:

Anyway, I can't talk to you without saying that it's so wonderful to still have you here after you're absolutely biblical sort of chucking into the vortex of surviving the COVID coma. I'm hoping and I'm assuming you will be talking about that too. But a couple of years ago I know you're three years out now I got in touch with you initially and it's been a really happy slow burn. But I got in touch because I was really struck with the. Just the analogy that was so obvious that you indeed picked up on any way in your own book about getting better. I thought, you know, obviously, going on a bear hunt we're going on a bear hunt is just one of the most seminal books of all my children's childhoods. And just the analogy of the fact you didn't half go through it because my gosh you know my giddy-good on you had a, the most extraordinary time which has given you. Well, it's been extraordinary. So I'm just so, so delighted that you're still with us.

Michael Rosen:

Thank you. Yes, I did try very hard to die and they wouldn't let me. Yes, they put me in an induced coma. Quite hard to say. Is it in an induced coma for 40 days? So it was biblical. Yes, that's right 40 days and 40 nights. You may have noticed, I'm not Jesus. Jesus was Jewish and so am I. But that's where the coincidence ends, where the similarity ends. And but a bit like Noah, I always think you remember he, it was raining for 40 days and 40 nights for Noah, but I didn't have an arc, I just had a bed and also I wasn't allowed to be there with my wife. I think Noah was in the arc with his wife. I mean, I found out what Noah's wife was called, other than Mrs Noah. But anyway, there you go. And there were no animals there either. Lots of incredibly nice nurses who wrote a diary for me, so I can find out what it was like when I was in a coma by reading the diary.

Chris Grimes:

And, by the way, I've seen many a clip which has moved me and my family to tears where you're thanking the nurses for what they did during that period. I mean, it was just an extraordinary time in everybody's history. But for you personally, talking about going through it, and indeed your book Getting Better Life Lessons on Going Under, getting Over it and Getting Through it has been a very profound piece of work for us all.

Michael Rosen:

Yes, and in many different kinds of love, that book. I was able to put extracts from the nurses diary. In fact, people quite often say that's more interesting what I wrote about it, which I sort of take as a compliment, as it happens, because it's just so incredible to see working people nurses talking about their work, what they're doing to make sure that I'm comfortable and breathing properly and my blood pressure is okay, and thinking about their job, and there it is laid out in this diary and I've put long extracts from these and they're very, very moving in many different kinds of love. That's the book that came before Getting Better.

Chris Grimes:

Yeah, and in researching you. By the way, I've just been watching the Goldsmiths Writers Center film, where you were talking about, specifically, the Getting Better book, and I was really struck when you were talking about the fact there's a whole, obviously a 40 day, 40 day chunk in your life that you've got no words for and yet now you've subsequently been able to write something incredibly profound and helpful to help others through trauma.

Michael Rosen:

Well, I hope so. I mean, only the other day I was on some form of chat about intensive care, that sort of thing, because that's what it's called, in case people don't know you're in intensive care and then they put you into a coma. Anyway, it's the sort of extreme last ditch attempt to keep people alive. Yes, and it's very, very disturbing because they they're basically filling you full of drugs to make you go to sleep. And if, in the case of with me, I was ventilated or intubated, so you've got to imagine a tube here. Look, I'll take a bottle, a tube going down my throat, like that. So I'm lying in bed with this plastic tube going down my throat with a pumping air into it, and the thing is is that they have to give you paralyzing drugs as well. So you have two sets of powerful drugs putting you to sleep, and that's for the induced coma, and then to paralyze you, so you don't pull the tube out, because that's what they're worried about.

Michael Rosen:

And when you come off this coma, people some people suffer very traumatic feelings, images, senses, hallucinations, delirium, all sorts of you know, we have all sorts of words to describe this. I was fairly lucky in the sense that mostly I got just quite strange dreams, rather than terrifying or damaging ones. I was very worried about this and a man rang in on the Q&A section of this talk and he said that he couldn't distinguish between when he was in the coma and coming out of it. He didn't know sort of properly that he had actually come out of it. So there's just one example that I've heard of others, of people lying in bed thinking that they were being strangled by the clock at the end of the bed.

Michael Rosen:

I remember my dad not being in a full coma but receiving quite some heavy sedation, and he kept going on about this giant fly above his head and in the end the only way in which I could sort of quiet him down really was to say it's okay. It's okay, father, I've got rid of it like that. But I mean, I hadn't because it wasn't there, and so you know, the good thing about this stuff is they put you to sleep and it saves some people's lives, many people's lives, and the downside is that your life may be saved but you may have a form of post traumatic stress disorder. So I'm sort of trying to address those kinds of things, as well as some other traumas and bereavements and so on in my life, as well as those to help people.

Chris Grimes:

And you describe there the dreamscape. Does the coma pull you into sort of a dreamscape and a different reality, or are you just completely unaware and catatonic for that period? Or do you not know?

Michael Rosen:

The actual period of the coma. I've got no memories, apart from at one point. I think I had a sense that I well, I know that I did. I had gloves, mittens and that was to stop me pulling up the tracheostomy, because after they took the tube out, there we go, we'll do the mime again. After they took the tube out, they put a tube into my throat here to pump air in there. So that's called a trache or tracheostomy, and I just remember having mittens on my hand and complaining to the nurse, saying, nurse, nurse, why have I got these mittens? And she was Chinese nurse and she came over and she said relax, save your energy. I just remember the way she said it save your energy. I remember lying in bed saying that to myself. So I think I was still fairly sedated while that was going on.

Michael Rosen:

I can remember also the image of a nurse coming up and I thought she had like a medieval helmet on. Now I guess she just had her PPE on, at least I'm guessing so. But I think I thought that she had one of those advisors they called, you know, medieval armor and she had this sheet in front of her face and little slits for the eyes and yeah, I think those are two images that come from probably the end, as I was coming out of the coma. But that's about it really. The other 38 days, 39 days or whatever, they're all gone.

Chris Grimes:

I was also struck with another thing I read, or you said, about the fact the doctor about to put you under at the beginning of May. We sedate you because they do ask for your permission and you asking the question about will I wake up again?

Michael Rosen:

That's right. I said to you, said, will you sign this piece of paper to let us put you to sleep? And I said, will I wake up? And he said you've got a 50, 50 chance. And then I remember saying and if I don't sign the piece of paper, he said zero. Now I think he meant you know there's zero chance of you surviving. And so I signed the paper, which was a good move, though I found out later, particularly and sadly, that 42% of the patients in my intensive care ward did die. So when he said 50 50, he wasn't far off.

Chris Grimes:

And what are your energy levels like now? I'm aware sort of googling around about. You're very prolific, still you're off all over the place. You're back on stage, you're just turning up, you're doing this sort of thing. So how's morale and what are your energy levels now?

Michael Rosen:

Energy levels very good. I walked across the park today to get to my office, where we are now. That's about 1.67 miles. I did that about 30 minutes, so it's not terribly fast, but you know it's not bad. And yeah, I think it's 1.1.7, 1.8, something like that anyway. So I managed that inside 30 minutes. I was belting along at least I thought I was.

Michael Rosen:

I get a bit creaky in my legs I can't quite explain it really, but it's sort of my legs sometimes feel a bit ancient, most of the site in my left eye, and I've lost most of the hearing in my. Yeah, I have to say that very carefully because I quite often end up saying I've, I really can't hear with this eye and I can't see with this with this year. And I remember a kid at one school where I said that she said, yeah, well, you wouldn't, would you? And I thought that's very good, actually, well done, very quick, should it. She said, well, you wouldn't, would you? And I went oh, no, no, I can't hear, I can't see. Hmm, I can't see with my ear. No, neither can you. Yeah, so, yeah. So that happened because I had micro bleeds in my brain. So COVID is a complicated illness that can affect the blood vessels as well as the lungs. So I got micro bleeds in my brain as well as blood clots in my lungs. So there we are. I got the full whammy.

Chris Grimes:

Wow, and what is so, so wonderful to observe is that it has not affected your mental capacity in any shape or form. I've seen you speak about the fact it's just affected your hearing and your site on your left side.

Michael Rosen:

Yeah, but you haven't done a test of me remembering names. Now, you see, I'm going to remember your name, your Chris, and your surname is Grimes. So I've done quite well. Chris Grimes, I remember mine.

Chris Grimes:

Michael knows my name.

Michael Rosen:

Sorry, exactly I can remember my watch name, but I was talking to someone who I've known for years and years and years. I had to do a little interview on camera and I said, and it's wonderful to be here with, and he just went. I could remember Chris, charlotte. Then I remember the Charlotte and the first thing I thought the film star, charlotte Rampling, because her name's got an E on the end. I just got stuck and we had to do a retake. While I very embarrassedly had to ask this woman's name, there's a guy at work.

Chris Grimes:

Now see whether I can remember his name.

Michael Rosen:

His name is Francis Gilbert, where I work at Goldsmith's, and I always think that his name is the name of that writer, the guy who did the screenplay for the Cray brothers movie, philip Ridley. Yeah, so I always think his name is Philip Ridley but his name is Francis Gilbert. So when I see him I go, oh, there's Philip rid. No, it's not Philip Ridley. So I say, oh, francis Gilbert, so there's another one. So you can test me at some point in this suddenly snap out thing and say who wrote great expectations? And if I say William Shakespeare, you see I've got it wrong. I'll get that one. That's Charles Dickens.

Chris Grimes:

But you can try me with some names and I really bump. Technicloud did test you, because I whipped out a book you weren't expecting to see and then you immediately whistled off a poem. Yes, so I think you're doing very well. Great pleasure to welcome you to the Good Listening To Show stories of distinction and genius. You'll see how you're fitting right in with everything I'm trying to achieve here.

Chris Grimes:

And so we're going to talk about a clearing, a tree that we're going to shake your tree. See which storytelling apples fall out. There'll be some alchemy, some gold, a couple of random squirrels, a golden bat and a cake. There's also a bell for if we go down any rabbit holes. Catch you, number three, please. So I'll curate you through it. It takes about 4550 minutes. You'll feel happy and exhilarated and even more awesome on the other way out. So sounds wonderful. So where is? Let's get cracking then. Where is what is a clearing for the great playwright Sorry, great children's author that is, mr Michael Rosen? Have you written plays as well? I'm sure you have. You must have done. Yes, I have written several.

Michael Rosen:

Yes, that's right. That wasn't a test, that was my testing myself Indeed. Well, one of them is where you are right now, and here I mean you're not. You're in custard land, but my office here in a place called the chocolate factory. Oh yes, make chocolate anymore. It stopped making chocolate, I think, in the 1950s, but it got converted into offices and tell you what we can do a little bit of live telly here. I can move the camera around. Whoops, it's all lots of things connected.

Chris Grimes:

By the way, you'll make a wonderful Willy Wonka If you're about to show me around an old chocolate factory.

Michael Rosen:

Exactly. So you can see some piles of boxes there. Yes, here you can see some books, and then down there you can see an alleyway. And that alleyway you might see some funny gray handles. Well, those are those windy things for shelves, because I've got a few thousand books down there, and so this is my office and then here's my desk and you can see that's very, very untidy and it's got some very treasured things on it which I can walk you around at any point if you want to sort of all sorts of treasures of one sort or another. So there we are. So this is my space, so this is my clearing and this is where I do a lot of my writing.

Chris Grimes:

And how long have you had that ex chocolate factory? Wonderful clearing.

Michael Rosen:

Well, I had another one in another bit of the chocolate factory from about 2012. And then they moved me out because they were doing renovations into this one. So you could say I've been in the chocolate factory since 2012 and been in this room for about six of those years six or seven, I think.

Chris Grimes:

Yeah, Do you know what's perfect about that? Put the right wig on you. You would be a living spit of Gene Wilder in all his chocolate.

Michael Rosen:

Yes, Well, we share a cultural origin. Gene Wilder was Jewish. So you know, I suppose, with a bit of an effort, smooth my face out a bit and a bit more sort of poking, there we are, I could do a little bit of Willy Wonka. There you go. Hi, I'm Gene Wilder. Hi, I'm Gene Wilder and I'm playing Willy Wonka. And Ronald Darrell didn't like me playing Willy Wonka. He disliked me playing it so much he took his name off the movie.

Chris Grimes:

Crikey yes, he did Absolutely. Yeah, I love the fact you've also got your own archive, but you're a living archive in the sense of having concertinaed shelving With your books means you've got a croploder books in there.

Michael Rosen:

Yes, and there's some big cupboards down there and in fact in a box there that's sitting over there are my very first writings. I sort of pulled them out of various other bits and put them in a special box, because sometimes people say to me you know what's the first poem you wrote? I haven't got that one, by the way, but I've got the third poem I wrote and I've also got my teenage diary. I can see from here and there's a little special box. So yes, it is an archive. I would just leave the frame and show you the box.

Chris Grimes:

Fantastic. Thank you so much for this tour.

Michael Rosen:

And here's the box. And then when I was a pretentious teenager, I bought myself or possibly my dad bought it for me. Actually this was my notebook for writing poems in, and there you can see from a distance is my third ever poem and it's called Moth and it's rather like I won't say it's plagiarism it's rather like DH Lawrence's poem man and Bat. He also wrote a poem called Bat, another one called Snake, so I thought I'd write a poem called Moth and my poem Moth is about a moth that comes into the room and very like DH Lawrence's Bat. And yeah, that's so. That's there. And in there is also my teenage diary and I think the first story I ever wrote which went into a newspaper, a newspaper's Children's Annual. So there we are.

Chris Grimes:

The question on everyone's lips, and mine, is where's poem number one and two, please?

Michael Rosen:

Is that book, as Poem number one went into a class magazine and I didn't keep a copy of it. All I can remember is one line from it. Please hang on to seats now, because this line is so exciting that you know cameras will shake, mountains will crack, rivers will dry up. Here it is, and now the train is slowing down. That's it, guys. That's it. I think we've got that incredible line from my first poem.

Chris Grimes:

You're borrowing from a bit of not not not you plagiarizing, but that sounds a bit sort of prelude-esque, a bit TS Eliot, he going for a bit of concisionalism, she's with a little dash possibly, of a sort of reverse form of Robert Louis Stevenson's poem faster than fairies, faster than witches.

Michael Rosen:

You know the train speeding along that Robert Louis Stevenson did, and I suppose I thought I'd rush the poem about a train that was slowing down instead of speeding along. So that was poem one and poem two are actually. Yes, there was another poem on one occasion I may have this one. Actually, on one occasion our English teacher was leaving the room and as he was leaving the room, some kid put his hand up. This was year what we would now call year seven. I said oh, sir, you haven't set us homework, we're upon. We all jumped on him and said shut up, god save me.

Michael Rosen:

And Mr Brown, who was a lovely bloke, I can tell a whole story about Mr Brown. Mr Brown put his head back around the door and he said OK, homework, write a Robin Hood ballad. And he left the room and we weren't doing ballads and we weren't doing Robin Hood. I didn't know what Robin Hood ballad was. So I went home and both my parents were teachers and mum said to me when she came in from primary school teaching, and she said oh Michael, what's your homework? She was always very solicitous, always asking me how it was what I was doing, you see, and I said, mum, I got a right Robin Hood ballad. And she said, oh, that's nice, I don't know what to do, mum. And she said, oh, that's all right, I'll help you. And so we sat down and wrote a Robin Hood ballad. So that was poem two.

Michael Rosen:

Poem three wasn't math, I've just remembered. Poem three was our teacher, misgrant, was doing a lovely unit on what are called dramatic monologues. They really like Shakespeare soliloquies. But there are poems that are like that and the one that I love most of all is the one that begins that's my last duchess, which is by Robert Browning, and it's a very kind of sex sort of poem because you realize halfway through or three courses away through the poem and speaking, who is a Duke, he was married to a duchess, has probably done her in, and you just slowly realize this and it's kind of. It's kind of disgusting.

Michael Rosen:

You know, I gave orders. He says, and you go, what kind of orders? You know roof. So it's a really chilling poem and I got quite grabbed by that. And Miss Grant said a bit like Mr Brown said homework, write a dramatic monologue. So I went home and I wrote a dramatic monologue and I think you'll find it in Harrowield County Grammar School magazine of about 1958 or 59, possibly 59. And it's in there. So that's poem three, and poem four is moth, which may have got into the school magazine as well. So there we are. So I think probably we've got certainly two of them. We could find those and I think the Robin Hood Ballad is somewhere over there in the pile of my old exercise books.

Chris Grimes:

I was going to give you an extra million points, no cash attached. If you could go to your archive and whip out the school magazine that you're talking about, that has your poem number two or three in it.

Michael Rosen:

That would take a bit of time. I don't know where to look.

Chris Grimes:

We won't do that, then Okay, so we're in the clearing then. Thank you for that. It's beautifully positioned, where you're completely at home, in your own sort of poetic alchemic place where your alchemy in Gold takes place within Europe. It's so appropriate, by the way, that it's an ex chocolate factory because it's your chocolate cake.

Michael Rosen:

Yes, my son and his whole well, a whole generation of kids just adore your chocolate cake and I think at one point the people who ran this factory took over the people who made licorice all sorts and I do rather like licorice all sorts. So I think not only was this place pumping out chocolates but also pumping out licorice all sorts. I'd have to check on the history, but it's what I read, at least at one point.

Chris Grimes:

Gene Wilder stroke Bertie Bassett is what we're talking now.

Michael Rosen:

Yeah, I think they did. They took over Bertie Bassett.

Chris Grimes:

I always think his name is Percy Bassett, but it isn't You're doing very well on all the names you've been tested on so far, so you're doing really well. Okay, so we're in your clearing Now I'm going to arrive a bit waiting for Goddow Esk, existentially with a tree, to shake your tree to see which storytelling apples fall out. How'd you like these apples? So this is where you've been kind enough now to have given your responses to five minutes, to have thought about four things that have shaped you, michael Rosen, three things inspire you and so on. So put our key right through it. First of all, four things that have shaped you, and please feel free to go as deep as you like, wherever you like.

Michael Rosen:

Well, three of them are very easy One's called mum, one's called dad and one's called my brother, brian. So I'll come back to them in a minute. And the fourth one, well, I think I'm going to go back to Barry Brown. Barry Brown, remember, was the man who said write a Robin Hood ballad. Anyway, going back. So there we are. Those are the four. Now let's go back over mum and dad. So, mum and dad, they came.

Michael Rosen:

My father was born in America, my mother in London. They were brought up in London's East End from a Jewish background, and so their first language, or the language they were surrounded with when they were young, is a not English, it was Yiddish, which is a Germanic language, which is a Germanic dialect, if you like, with bits of Hebrew, slavonic, polish, all sorts of words in it, bits of Hebrew in it, and so that was the language that they was their first language, and when I was being brought up, they used to mix English and Yiddish. They were both great storytellers in their own way. Both loved poetry and stories. They were my father was an English teacher at a secondary school, my mum a primary school teacher, and my brother I think he thought that I didn't have enough parents. He wasn't enough and so he thought he'd be the third parent. And so it's not strange really, he anything he learned at school, he thought he had to teach me. So our bedroom, which we shared, it was like a classroom. So there's a bit of a problem with this, because he's four years older than me.

Michael Rosen:

Very, very clever. So clever that that secondary school he missed out a year. He pushed him up from year one, you know as we used to call it, but year seven, we'll call it now. He missed out year eight altogether. He shut the wedge. He went straight from year seven to year nine. So by the time I was like, well, what shall we say? 10, he was doing stuff that 15 and 16 year olds were doing. So can you imagine I'm lying in bed and he'd go right, that's what he had called me time for calculus. I promise you he would try to teach me calculus.

Michael Rosen:

Now the thing is, you've got two cars, mick, and they're both accelerating, but one of them is accelerating faster than the other one. How could you tell the difference in their rates of acceleration? And I'd go. I don't know. I don't want to know, I don't know. Listen, mick, listen. What you have to do is to have to decide whether you're going to differentiate or integrate. What did this mean? And then he'd start gabbling away in letters. He'd go D2Y by D2X, d2y by D2X, d2x. Down the road He'd go to integrate. I had no idea what he was on about.

Michael Rosen:

That was one half of him, but the other half of my brother is that it was a stand up comedian. He actually used to do what really. He turned the bedroom into like stand up comedy. So he used to perform quite often what were really skits and takeoffs and impressions of my mum and dad. So my dad, you know, he would like have different ways of speaking, lots of different ways actually. So if he was telling you off, you'd go. Never let me see you doing that again. So, my brother, he'd get up in bed, going never let me see you doing that again. Or my dad, if he wants you to be quiet. You see, he didn't say quiet, he didn't use the Yiddish word, which is shtum, that some people know as in keep shtum. He didn't say that In order for us to be quiet.

Michael Rosen:

My dad used to go like this the noise, that's all he'd say the noise. So, my brother, we'd be mucking around in the bedroom having pillow fights, and I'm in the middle of it all. My brother would go the noise so it was like stand up comedy in the bedroom and he would read me things. Some people may know the Moldsworth books down with school and withs for atoms by Jeffrey Willins, and beautiful, wonderful, terrific pictures by Ronald Sewell, and my brother used to perform these books for me quite seriously. He just used to perform them. He'd stand up and read them and then we'd pour over the pictures and say, oh, that teacher, you know, drawn by Ronald Sewell, he's like Barry Brown. Oh, that one is like Mr Holt, that one's like. And we do that, you see. So on the one hand there was my brother being teacher.

Chris Grimes:

He was obviously very infectious in that regard to how you perform your poetry, because you absolutely animate it in the most extraordinarily compelling way, particularly for a whole squadron. That's right. Whatever, the collective assembly is the word I was looking for.

Michael Rosen:

Yeah, well, you could mix assembly and squadron, so you would have a squadron or you could have an ascender on, an ascender on yeah, why not? I was going to say ascender on, obviously. Yeah, come on, let's have a whole ascender on. Well it is. It's Nick, partly for my brother and partly from a very inspiring teachers, another one actually called Sean McElaine, a wonderful Irish deputy head at a school called Princess Fred Rica. He also taught me how to perform.

Michael Rosen:

I remember once I had a very strange illness called hypothyroidism that made me very sluggish and slow and inactive. And he invited me to his school and I think he thought from the poems that I was some sort of live wire. But at that point I was so slow and so sluggish and my speech was so slurred that he got me in front of the school and he opened the door of his office and I really wasn't ready for this. The whole school was there because his little office it opened out onto the whole school. He opened the door and said positive girls, it's Michael Rosen. And they went and I tried to hide behind my book because I was a bit shy in those days, or a little bit anyway, and I kind of went and I said and now my corrosion is going to read a poem or perform a poem.

Michael Rosen:

And I kind of hid behind the book and I went the ship in the docks at the end of the trip and then on board the captain of the ship the name of the man was old Ben Brown, the lady ukulele, with his trousers down like this. And then I looked across at Mr McElaine and he was horrified to his look on his face. It was like Do you know what he did? He went. No, it doesn't go like that. Does he boys and girls imagine that? A very strong West of Ireland accent? No, it doesn't go like that. Does it boys goes. He took the book out of my hand and then he danced the poem. He went the ship in the docks at the end of the trip. The man on board is the captain of the ship, the name of the man is old Ben Brown and he played the ukulele with his trousers down and the whole school joined in, the whole school.

Chris Grimes:

I remember thinking oh, and were you thinking I would have done that if I didn't have hypothyroidism?

Michael Rosen:

Yeah, and of course my speech has slurred as well. I've heard recordings of me. It's like that Wow, so how old were you when that was happening to you? Sort of from about 20 to 30. For those 10 years possibly more, sort of 20 to 31, something like that.

Chris Grimes:

And I've got confused with my timeline there because you said it was happening at school and that teacher and about reading and I wasn't at my school.

Michael Rosen:

It was a school I was visiting.

Chris Grimes:

Ah, sorry, sorry, sorry yeah.

Michael Rosen:

I was yeah, sorry. Yeah, that's right, it was a school I was visiting because I'd already published a book. You see, a book or two.

Chris Grimes:

By the way, that's our other connection, the Thyroid Trust. Not that I've got Thyroidism, but Lorraine Williams, who was the sort of director of the trust. I know you are a patron of that particular of the Thyroid Trust, aren't you?

Michael Rosen:

I am. And, yeah, if only someone had spotted it. If did, Mr Sean McElaine had. So, anyway, so that was my brother was an inspiration here. So I've gone off onto Sean McElaine so we haven't mentioned Barry Brown. So that was, remember, was my fourth choice. So Barry Brown was. Well, if you imagine, I went to a secondary school called Harrow Wheel County Grammar School went there in 1957. Now, grammar schools in the late fifties they were quite musty. You know how uniform was gray, you know there weren't any lights on in the school and some of the teachers wore gowns and some of them, you know they were born in, some of them were born in about 1900. You know, yeah, that's right, 1957, they'd only be in the late fifties. There were, we had, some teachers who were born in the 19th century. Just think, yeah, Miss Drury. I think, yeah, I can remember her, she was how appropriate.

Chris Grimes:

Your first poem was that. Well, your third or fourth poem was the Moth, because it sounds a bit mothbally.

Michael Rosen:

Well, exactly, Apart from Barry Brown suddenly into the middle of this slightly musty place. Think of the desks. You know those old desks with lids, you know with ink stains and somebody had scrawled on it. You know Jack loves Mary. You know one of these things, and it was.

Michael Rosen:

You had little ink wells, because it was still dip pens just at the very beginning when I went to school, and so the place smelled of ink and the ceilings were covered with the fact that kids used to eat the blotting paper, chew it up, put it on the end of a ruler, stick the ruler in the edge of the desk and go barring the blotting paper used to hit on the wall and some people even devised a way of taking the foil that used to come in cigarette packets and they'd make it so that it was like a sort of one of those arrows that got a sticky thing on the end and they'd go. It would go and then stick on the ceiling. So the ceiling was covered because it was so high nobody could get up there to take it off. So it was with blotting paper and things like that, and then we used to even not only, you know, put them in our mouths, we used to pour ink on them and go. And so there were blue ones as well as pink ones up on the ceiling and it smelled of ink and, of course, old cabbage because of school dinners. So they used to. You had cabbage. You know, 10 days a week is extraordinary how much cabbage we used to get through and the whole place, the whole school, smelled of cabbage and ink.

Michael Rosen:

And, as I say, the uniform was gray and you know, when it became evening in winter, they would like wait to put the lights on to save electricity, so used to sit in the gloom while a teacher used to screech away on a blackboard yeah, blackboards with a chalk, and 19 plus 23,. Dy by two X. No, I never got to that. And anyway, into the middle of this came Barry Brown. Barry Brown, I don't even know how to say this. This is so extraordinary and embarrassing. He wore suede shoes.

Chris Grimes:

OMG.

Michael Rosen:

Just eat that, guys. Into the middle of this came a guy. We just look what he did this blood and something else. You know what? He had a Manchester accent, oh, in North London, please. He went to Manchester Grammar School, as he often told us. I went to Manchester Grammar. It was suede shoes and a Manchester accent, Okay. And then he used to do like the weirdest of things. Well, sometimes, for example, he would sit let's see where I'm slouching right this he would sit with his feet up on the desk.

Chris Grimes:

It's like no, no, gallagher's pop deeds to teach you something it was.

Michael Rosen:

It was incredible, he would sit like that and then he would just do crazy things. And he decided that we should have a school play. The school player had sort of gone into remission or whatever you say. They weren't doing the school plays. And Barry said, well, we've got to have a school play. And he found this play called Under the Sycamore Tree, which was about ants. It's quite a well-known play. Actually it's an American play and it's quite funny. And so we all had to dress up as ants and I wanted to be in the play and he said, yeah, no, I'd love you to be in the play because it was mostly fifth and sixth formers, that's to say year 11, 12, 13 to it.

Michael Rosen:

But I was so pleaded with him and I can remember I had to give a little speech where I had to say that I was a sort of servant of an ambassador, but the word then the word in the dialogue was plenty potentially. Do you think I could say it when I was 12? I'd go. I am the plenty. You put your chup. You put your chup, you go. Let's try again, michael. Let's try again. I am the plenty potential a century. And then you're taking me through on the syllables. Plenty potential, uh, rick, plenty potential. Okay, do it, then. I am the potential potential Linchurage.

Michael Rosen:

Anyway, um, dear old Barry, help me with that. And he was lovely, he was very, very. What does plenty potential mean? Sorry to Plenty potential, I think, is an ambassador's envoy. Of course it is. I knew that I was testing it Somebody who's sent out by the ambassador to go and do stuff. But instead of saying envoy which I would have managed, and even the French in those days, because I could do French I would have said j'ai juste vu on what. But instead of that, if that is an envoy anyway, and, uh, so that was Barry.

Michael Rosen:

And then here's a sad story now. Um, okay, so I'm on Russell Square Station this is about five or six years ago and as I get off the train, uh, this voice says it's Michael, and I turn around and there was Barry. Wow, and he was in a suit. Uh, and we had a little chat and we talked about my dad being an old lefty and he said we must meet up, we must, must meet up, and so we swapped addresses and things like that. The next thing I heard was that he had died. Uh, and so we didn't meet up, and then I was chatting to a friend of mine.

Chris Grimes:

And so just to stop there. Did you look down at his? Was he still wearing suede shoes, or?

Michael Rosen:

Yeah, I think he was actually yes, um good point. And a friend of mine, alan Franks, from university. He said there's an obituary of uh, barry Brown coming up in the times where Alan Franks used to work. I think uh because Barry Brown had become quite successful theater agent uh with a a Norse elite uh fond group of actors who absolutely loved him. There was any stable Um, and he knew I had some little jokie stories about Barry and he asked me to add a kind of addendum to the obituary that they're done, and so I was able to write um an obituary notice or addendum uh for Barry Brown in the times. So it was the least I could do.

Chris Grimes:

Um, in fact, now you mentioned Barry Brown, the agent. Of course that makes sense. Of course one was in Manchester and then suddenly we're in London in an agency for actors, so that, yes, gosh.

Michael Rosen:

So Barry was the fact that he was, I was, hard to describe. Some people are inspiring not because of specific things they do, but how they are, and I think the thing about Barry was that he sort of showed that if you wanted to be one of these people who liked writing, likes books and that sort of thing, you don't have to do it in this stuffy, gray, uniformy way. I sort of knew that by my dad because my dad was an English teacher and very unconventional, unorthodox sort of a guy. But it's your dad.

Chris Grimes:

But, but, but forget that and the way your brother learned as well, the fact that it was very visual, very on display, very passionate and forthright.

Michael Rosen:

That's right. And Barry sort of he loved reading the books out loud to us. I mean he wanted to be an actor. I just think he I saw him, in fact, yes, the another thing he did for me was that he was an actor for the hatch-end players. So Pinner is next to a little, another suburban little kind of sort of villages, suburban villages engulfed by lots and lots of housing and there's play called Hatch-End. It's on the line going out of London.

Michael Rosen:

And he became an actor for Hatch-End, the Hatch-End players, and he was in Merchant of Venice and he played Bassanio and he said, would you like to be in Merchant of Venice? And I was 11 or 12. And I said, yeah, you bet, barry. And he said, yes, you could be one of the Prince of Morocco's slaves. So I thought, great, and I'm ashamed to say this now in the modern world, but I did black up. So this is, you know, anybody who wants to say Michael Rosen is a racist. Well, I try not to be. And perhaps the most racist thing I did was to black up when I was 11 as the Prince of Morocco's slave. And I remember every night I used to sponge myself down with this brown foundation all over because I just wore a kind of loincloth.

Michael Rosen:

Ok, so every night I used to take a hot bath and one night apparently I hadn't really done my belly, I found nothing else. So I came onto the stage and the moment I came on there were these giggles in the audience and people were laughing because there was this weirdly blacked up boy. It was obviously just some local kid with his great big pink belly and I was quite portly in those days and apparently I did upstage. I was the laugh of the night. I mean, merchant of Venice is not full of laughs. There's a few with a guy who's a lot more who tricks his poor old blind dad, but they're the only laughs in the play, usually, unless you do laugh rather grimly at the end with a laugh at Shylock. And so, of course, the moment I came off they said what do you think you've been doing? You didn't put the makeup. Everybody's laughing at all. The glisters is not gold when the Prince of Morocco is trying to find the key, solve the riddle in order to marry Portia. Portia, yes, I think so. Do I remember?

Chris Grimes:

the clock. You did very well. That's a very interesting story. If you remember when you go back to your cell, you do yes exactly Fantastic, but Dear Old Barry thought this was hysterical.

Michael Rosen:

He thought this was so funny. So there we are. There was two reasons, plenty of potentially. Look, I can say it.

Chris Grimes:

If I may, maybe been an abarital pinball machine of name recall so you saying it was incredible, isn't it?

Michael Rosen:

And my pink belly playing the prince of Morocco, servant or slave one or the other? Yes, and Dear Old Barry, who I didn't get to see even though we recognised each other.

Chris Grimes:

You did reconnect again, which was lovely.

Michael Rosen:

There was that moment. I sort of somehow feel that is a little moment of joy. Yeah, Nice.

Chris Grimes:

Something you've said in my researching is that death doesn't wear creaky boots, so you don't know who's going to go next, basically, no, and that's a quote from my former wife's sister, that's right.

Michael Rosen:

When our son Eddie died, so that's Eddie's mum's called Susanna and she went home, obviously, or to immediately told her sister, and her sister said death doesn't wear creaky boots. And first I didn't know what it meant. It was so elliptical, poetical, imaginative, metaphorical, so incredible, personificationally wonderful and sad. And I remember Susanna explaining to me what she means is you don't hear death coming, you don't see death coming. Ah, it doesn't wear creaky boots. And I was so moved by it and it was so appropriate for what had happened that literally, Eddie just went. Yes, yes, I've never forgotten that phrase. It's so powerful.

Chris Grimes:

Yes, and I know that was 1999. And again, a testament to your wonderful survival, because you've been through the whole gamut, absolutely the whole gamut of human emotion in what you've had to deal with, and yet you're still incredibly optimistic, vibrant and you've found a way through.

Michael Rosen:

Yes, my view on that is there's no point in being pessimistic. Because you could be pessimistic, in other words, thinking life's going to be horrible, life's horrible, and then you could die. And then I sort of imagine this moment. Just for you dying, you go. Oh well, why was I pessimistic all that time when I could have enjoyed myself? Yes, I think, well, you might as well be optimistic, because at the end it's going to come anyway. So there's no point in being pessimistic about it because it'll come. So you might as well be optimistic and have a good time rather than be all glum and pessimistic.

Michael Rosen:

Yes, and my daughter once explained to me that I'm an optimistic nihilist. That's why you send your children to university so they come back saying things like this. She said the point about you, dad, is you're an optimistic nihilist. And I said oh, hang on a minute, what's that? And she said well, you don't believe in an afterlife, you don't believe in any deity or divinity, but you're very optimistic. You think to make the most of life as it is. And I thought, oh, wonderful thanks, elsie. You've given me a phrase, you've given me a thing to describe myself. So I am an optimistic nihilist. So there you go.

Chris Grimes:

Yes, how long have you been sitting on the throne of optimistic nihilism, in terms of her defining it for you?

Michael Rosen:

About nine months ago. Oh, brilliant, yes, so she, yeah, I mean, she's just finished at university, she's just finished this July, june, I think, and yes, so she's given me that little phrase. That little, it's not quite a portmanteau phrase, that would be a word like smog, smoke and fog that's portmanteau but anyway a little phrase that I can carry about with me in a thing like a portmanteau, whatever that is. Do you know what Americans call a wallet? No, a billfold. Ah, it's good, isn't it? It is good A wallet. I think possibly plenty of people know what a wallet is, but the word they, the older Americans, say they call it a billfold. It's wonderful, isn't it?

Chris Grimes:

Anyway, ignore that, and I think of billfold as being those sort of clips that you can put notes into.

Michael Rosen:

you know that you sometimes get yeah, I think we call those a bulldog clip, don't we?

Chris Grimes:

Well for your money it doesn't matter.

Michael Rosen:

No, anyway, so I carry around.

Chris Grimes:

That was me going down my own rabbit hole there. Sorry about that. Probably what I noticed you're doing brilliantly is you're lovely in a beautiful way. You're melding what's shaped you into what's also been inspiring you. So this is a lovely time in the canopy shaking your tree. So would you now like to talk about any other things that inspire or shape before I move you on to the two things that never felt a grab your attention?

Michael Rosen:

I'm always interested in songs and poems, plays, films, so I kind of am very porous. So it's probably just like all other people who write and so on is that we look at this stuff and part of us is being moved by it, excited by it, amused by it, and there's another little bit in us going oh, that would be fun to write like that. Oh, that would be interesting to write like that. So there's like a whole range of stuff.

Michael Rosen:

You know, if I watch Glastonbury, you know which I do, or I watch Jules and listen to these singers, there's a young singer now called I think she calls herself Cat Burns yeah, and I'm just like in awe. I mean she's just just pours out of her or loyal carna. These people like that, and it just seems to pour out of them these sort of autobiographical monologue things. Yeah, I look at them and I think, wow, that's just great, and so it sort of opens up like a little possibility. So that's very general answer to your question, but it gives you an idea of when I'm watching somebody like Jules Holland's. Later, later with Jules or Glastonbury or things like that, there is a little bit of me going oh yeah, no, you could. Oh, right, that's interesting.

Chris Grimes:

So those are your squirrels, as you define them, just the. You're always going to stop abruptly and just tune into that as to what they're giving you in terms of how they narrate their stories, that's right?

Michael Rosen:

Yeah, I think many writers like that, so I'm not saying anything exceptional, but that is what I do, yeah.

Chris Grimes:

And you've described your own writing approach as being all about sparety. In the end, you say, even though it's incredibly ebullient and spills lots and lots of meaning. You've talked about it being very spare.

Michael Rosen:

Yes, it might be. There's different styles, but one of the styles that I'm most experiment with at the moment is this spareness, and it's inspired. It sounds quite sort of pompous and grandiose but it's inspired partly by the modernists. People like TS Eliot and you know the other images early. Ts Eliot, yeah, Though you get it in something like a cold coming, you know, in the beginning of the journey of the Magi. But he did a little set of poems about London, about London streets, called preludes, and it's just got little things like and the lighting of the lamps and that may seem completely unremarkable, but if you look at the poem, four little preludes they're called, and the first two of them are just these little snapshot pictures of London streets and the images those people writing just before the First World War. People like Ezra Pound. There's another guy called FS Flint, TE Hume, and American writers, HD and Amy Lowell, and there was a whole little movement of them and they were in part inspired by ancient Chinese poetry. So there's people called Dufu and Li Bai, I think he's called, and they wrote in this spare way and certainly it that style helped me write about Eddie when he died. It's helped me write about hypothyroidism and it's helped me write about my illness and then also about quite comical things, and sometimes just like snapshots.

Michael Rosen:

I mean, I just tweeted something today. I was trying to eat it. I wrote, just did it just earlier today. I am trying to eat a lettuce. No, do it again. It went. I'm trying to eat lettuce with a spoon.

Michael Rosen:

Now this may seem completely absurd and crazy, and surely there's a lot more to it than that. No, there isn't. But of course it expresses a certain absurdity of the kinds of things we're doing. Notice, it's in the present. I am trying. So it continues. It exists before the poem, it exists during the poem and it exists after it.

Michael Rosen:

Is it a poem? Well, sentence I am trying to eat lettuce with a spoon. And so I can see now, off the tail of this is all sorts of people going why are you doing that? Why don't you know? I've the best thing to do is put it in the microwave. Oh, there's hundreds of responses to it and I think I've actually written a good little poem because it's had lots and lots of responses and because it's slightly mysterious and intriguing and utterly spare. You see that it's it's got no subordinate clauses, it's got no expanded noun phrases. So it doesn't say when or where I am. It doesn't say what mood I'm in. It doesn't say whether I'm enjoying myself or hating doing it. So it's mysterious. It's spare. I'm trying to eat lettuce with a spoon and people are going well, what are you doing that? I mean, you know, use a knife and fork.

Chris Grimes:

Well, that's very reminiscent of the apocryphal story about Ernest Hemingway betting a group of his writing buddies that he could write a compelling story in just six words. Have you heard this story? And it's the for sale baby shoes never worn. And then he leaves the bar a richer man, because he wins the bet. Because you have to agree it's compelling and it makes you go. It takes you to the whole gamut of what could be possible.

Michael Rosen:

Perfect, perfect analogy. That's it. So I'm quite often looking for little, very spare sentences, or very spare might be, you know, 10 words, 20 words, or, in this case, I am trying to eat lettuce with a spoon nine, nine words, you see. So people say, well, that's not time, it's stupid, and all the rest of it.

Michael Rosen:

But at the same time, if you sit and look at it which is what Chinese poets and Japanese poets suggested that you do is that when you're faced, faced with a haiku which, of course, is based on syllables, five, seven, five that you look at it and think about it and as you think about it, you will find yourself thinking about time passing, maybe, or seasons, or the state of how absurd it is that we're on this earth, all sorts of things. And you don't have to have, you know, paradise lost, which is, you know, thousands and thousands of words long. You can express important and essential things, that's to say the essence of things, sometimes with, well, in this case, nine words. So the actual absurdity of why, why is Michael trying to eat lettuce with a spoon when he could be using a knife and fork? Can't he find a knife and fork? Why not, maybe not eat the lettuce. There's all sorts of things to contemplate, and it's also the idea that you're stuck doing something, which we are, we're all stuck doing something.

Chris Grimes:

And, as you say, life is absurd. It is, yeah.

Michael Rosen:

So there's an example of one kind of poem that interests me, at its very shortest form.

Chris Grimes:

And now a quirky or unusual fact about you that we couldn't possibly know and you've been giving us loads of these anyway. But a quirky or unusual fact about you, we couldn't know about you until you tell us, michael.

Michael Rosen:

Right. So to illustrate a quirky and unusual fact, I'd like to be able to show you this, but you'll just have to imagine it. I thought I might have had it. You might have got it in the room Just one second. Maybe it's here Second, no, okay.

Michael Rosen:

So when I was brought up, when I was brought up in a place called Pinner, it lived in a flat over a shop, and if you know anything about shops, out the back there are always yards, and then if you live, if the shops are at a kind of tea junction, then there's a sort of square behind the shops. Can you imagine that? Yeah, I'm trying to show it, you see. So there's a square behind the shops where the lorries and the cars turn up the bin men come, the deliveries and all that. Well, that was my playground as it growing up was this, effectively this quite big yard at the meeting of Bridge Street and Love Lane, where we lived in Pinner. And so in my mind's eye I can go down the shops in Love Lane to the end to Bridge Street and then up Bridge Street, quite a few. So it's about in all, probably about 20 or 30 flats over shops, all backing onto this square and this alleyway.

Michael Rosen:

The surface of it was made up of pebbles, and very strange pebbles, a sort of car key colour. My brother's a geologist and paleontologist and ecologist. That's what my brother's job is. I think he once told me that because of the way the glaciers operated, the way the glaciers were around London, they produced a certain kinds of gravel, and some of it are like little nodular pebbles. Inside, I think, there's a flint, but the outside of them is like very hard calcium it's not chalk but sort of calciferous stuff and in the middle is flint. So that's what the surface of this thing was. It was made up of that.

Michael Rosen:

But I went there about a year ago because I was doing something at my old school and most of it had been covered over with tarmac. But there was one bit of it that was still the pebbles that I played on 70 years ago. So I picked up one of those pebbles and put it in the pocket of my coat and so I've got it in my coat. So when I want to remember Pina I can put my hand in my inside pocket in my overcoat and feel this little pebble that I must have played on hundreds of times with my friend Keith Townsend. We used to play cricket and football and all sorts of things there and I've never seen since we left there in 1962, I've never known what happened to Keith Townsend, anyway. So I've got that pebble. So there we are, there's a little story.

Chris Grimes:

I hope you haven't lost it, by the way, because you tried to reach for it, but it's in your coat pocket.

Michael Rosen:

It's in my coat pocket. It's in the inside pocket of my big winter coat and, as you know, it's not winter now.

Chris Grimes:

And when did you pick it up?

Michael Rosen:

Very recently, by the sound of it About less than a year ago, when some guys from the University of Westminster Film School made a film about me.

Chris Grimes:

Lovely, quirky or unusual fact we have shaken your tree, hurrah. Now we stay in the clearing, move away from the tree and next we talk about alchemy and gold. Please, no extra charge for the props. You're welcome. So when you're at purpose and in flow. What are you absolutely happiest doing, Michael?

Michael Rosen:

Well, apart from writing so let's leave that to one side I guess it's being with my family.

Michael Rosen:

You know, I had my 77th birthday and we went to a Turkish cafe around the corner from us and we sat there and as I sat there I looked up and down the rows at my family and, you know, with their partners and so on, and it just felt lovely.

Michael Rosen:

And then just this last weekend it was my oldest son's birthday and we sat in his garden and there was a blackbird trelling away in the background and there was a beautiful cake with raspberries in it and their daughter, my granddaughter, was running around in a sort of queen of the fairies dress of some sort, and there were people I didn't know I met for the first time, and my other son and my wife and our kids how youngest that is the one who called me an optimistic, nihilist and younger one, emil, who's just finished at school and it just felt beautiful and lovely.

Michael Rosen:

I mean anybody who enjoys family life not everybody does, but if they do, then I'm just doing something very ordinary that millions of people are doing all around the world just sitting and when subjects come up, we kind of bat them around and one moment we might be talking about Arsenal Football Club and another moment we might be talking about music. My son's wife is very much into music and other things. Somebody said what are you doing next? And so I think I talked about a bit of writing that I've been doing and talked about radios and stuff, and then other people talked about what they were doing and there was a couple of babies sort of babies going into codlers and it was just bliss, it was just such a lovely sort of relaxed kind of feeling. So that was beautiful absolutely beautiful.

Chris Grimes:

And how big is the Rosen clan when you're all together?

Michael Rosen:

Oh, wow, right. So I did have five children and two steps and we lost their D, so that took it down four and two. So the two steps they're married and have kids. And then of the my blood relations, as they say I don't like talking in those terms but anyway, my oldest, he has one, two, three, one child. So that's all making the family getting bigger and bigger. And then the other three haven't had babies yet. So there we are, there's quite a clan and we've all got partners. So it's getting up to be quite a number. So when we have our celebrations or indeed our commemorations of Eddie so that's another thing we do we all meet up very nearly around the time Eddie died so that we can commemorate losing our Eddie. And we usually do that in a lovely, big sort of spacious hub in North London on a Sunday lunch and that's very good. It's very sort of full of families, all kind of shouting and being jolly and that cheers us up. So that's another occasion when we all meet up.

Chris Grimes:

If I could ask, what time of year is that? The Eddie Memorial.

Michael Rosen:

Day Eddie died, do you know? He died in the night and it's rather peculiar. I don't know whether he died on the night of April the 26th or the night of April 27th, because it was the middle of the night. You never know what the date is in the middle of the night. So it sort of slightly embarrasses me, but at the same time I quite like the sort of indeterminacy of it that there's this night when this terrible thing happened and that I don't actually know the precise, you know, calendar date of it. It sort of doesn't matter.

Michael Rosen:

You know, we quite often think that what matters are dates, but actually what matters sometimes with experiences is this word. You're using the flow. So I remember the flow of feeling, and tying it to April 26th or April 27th is kind of a distraction, almost like a fly has come into the room and get don't forget April the 26th, don't forget April the 27th, and in a way, well, no, it doesn't matter. So let me just hold on to my feelings of that time and that's a bit more important. So one or other of those dates. So I think possibly it was technically the night of the 26th and he probably died in the morning of the 27th. That's what I think happened. So there we are. I'm answering the question finally.

Chris Grimes:

And I think there's been a very recent catharsis. As I understand it, in your book Getting Better. There is a section in it where you for the first time ever put the sort of, I suppose, the timeline you've sort of aligned the journey of it in a way that you hadn't before as a bit of catharsis. Is that right?

Michael Rosen:

Yes, absolutely right. I think I had it in my head and I've written lots of little bits about how I felt, or dreams that I have, or, and I did a little book called carrying the elephant, which is based on a picture that I found in Paris of a man carrying an elephant, and when I saw it I thought that's me, wow, a burden of Eddie. I don't mean Eddie's a burden, I mean the fact that he died is such a burden. I looked at it and thought that's me, I'm carrying the elephant and I've got to carry that for the rest of my life. And I bought the car. That is the car that's fading a bit, which is a shame. That's Eddie, by the way. Here he is as we're talking about him, there he is as a teenager and I remember thinking, yeah, so I wrote these poems about it, but they're fragments. And then I thought, as I sat down to do Getting Better, let's see what it feels like to write it out as the night, the day before the night, what happened the morning, what happened afterwards and something of how I've tried to cope with it. But they were laying it out in a line like that. It was like such a relief it's very hard to describe.

Michael Rosen:

I mean, if people say, tell me, you know awful tragic things, I do say to them just try writing down what happened, because part of the devil of it is you keep repeating it in your head. Yes, and when you write something down, sometimes it stops you repeating it. It's almost as I think you've released it and you don't have to keep repeating it in quite such a painful way. And until you've done it and unless you've done it you won't know the feeling. But anybody who's done it and it could be the occasion when you broke your leg, you know, and I was walking down the road and then I fell down and broke the leg. And you hear people, they quite often tell you that story about how they broke their leg and they'll tell it to you, if you know them well, about 20 times, which is fine. But I sometimes think it's because they haven't written it down. And if they wrote it down they wouldn't feel quite so compelled to have to tell it. And if they've told it 20 times in their head, they've told themselves that story 100, 500 times and that's where some of the pain comes in, through that repetitive telling.

Michael Rosen:

So one of the things about writing is that writing began because people wanted to preserve things, things they thought that they would forget, like the numbers of flower bags that they were loading onto ships, which is very hard to remember. So ancient Sumerian writing was numbers of flower bags, possibly so they could be taxed, or how much money they'd sold them for, and so on. So, in a way, though, that sounds very, very mundane, very, very banal and sort of like, what have flower bags got to do with somebody dying? Well, in a way, you are doing something similar. You're writing it down so you remember it, but also so you, in a funny sort of way, it's less necessary for you to remember orally or mentally In therapeutic terms, it's about carrying baggage.

Chris Grimes:

So flower bags, elephants, all speak to that.

Michael Rosen:

Actually Carrying the burden of memory or the burden of pain, yeah another image I have is the idea that when you've got these feelings, it's a bit like a balloon. The air is in the balloon, the surface of the balloon is all tight, it's hurting, it's under strain, it's under stress, and then you release the air and the balloon is just all soft and juicy and the pain and the strain has gone. You've released that story. You've released the air.

Chris Grimes:

So it was cathartic in that way, definitely. By the way, could I ask for a copy of that photograph? I think that's absolutely fantastic If you could take a at some point. Take a photo of it If you don't mind sharing it, if it's not too personal. What the elephant? I'll just explain why that speaks to me very profoundly. Yes, I love it. Yeah, I'm going to see my parents this weekend. And just in my sort of slight backstory, very quickly, our family have always had that slight shadow over us because my sister died in a car accident in 1979. Like, 1999 is a long time ago, but you'll never get over it. 79 is even longer ago and I'm aware that you know the baggage is still carried. I'm a parent, so I know what it's like to lose a sibling, but not heaven for a child. So you know, I understand the nature of grief and that picture is very profound and how it also just spoke to me. Thank you.

Michael Rosen:

Yes, you find it online. The artist is called Jean Baptiste, so that's Jean-Baptiste with an E on the end Jean-Baptiste, so he actually described it as the picture of him carrying an elephant in the story of Fable of Two Adventures.

Michael Rosen:

Well, I have dug up the fable once and I've forgotten it, but I think in the fable one of the people is carrying an elephant. If you go to Google Images and put in Les Deux Avanturiers, le Talisme, jean-baptiste Audrey, and the picture in fact is in the Musée de Petit Palais in Paris. So if you know Paris at all, there is Le Grand Palais, the big palace, which is a huge, great, big exhibition space, and then another lovely exhibition space called Le Petit Palais, meaning literally the little palace, where I think Quentin Blake once did an exhibition which is rather lovely, and obviously that is there in that, somewhere in an archive or possibly on the wall in Le Petit Palais. I haven't seen the original, so that is a gravure d'après Jean-Baptiste. So yes, that's right, it's an engraving after Jean-Baptiste Audrey. So there we are, so you can find that.

Chris Grimes:

It's also a wonderful testament to the journey and the long tale of grief, because you found something recently which then again spoke to you and filled in everything backwards, and that spoke to you again because obviously one never overcomes that.

Michael Rosen:

Yes, well, I found it actually only possibly a few weeks after he died, because Zana had the idea that we could go to Paris just to sort of lose ourselves or find ourselves or something, and there was no connection with Eddie, but just get away from people coming up to us saying very sorry that Eddie died, which, can you know, can get to you after a while, because everybody who meets you goes I'm terribly sorry, I'm terribly sorry While you're busy going about life thinking. I don't want to think about it just for the moment, of course. So we went to Paris and it was just mooched about and that was one of the things I've mooched into one of these. There's lots of lovely print shops and so on in Paris and selling things, and I remember finding this and thinking that's me, c'est moi, as you'd say in French. I speak French, c'est moi, that is me. Or you could have gone nice. Yeah, I could have gone nice, except I had already done it. Anyway, never mind that, okay.

Michael Rosen:

So yeah and I just recognised me as being that man total by identification.

Chris Grimes:

What's really profound is how both the picture of Eddie and the elephant, all this time on, are still just by your right hand, absolutely they're there and they're leaning up against a tortoise.

Michael Rosen:

And this tortoise was given to me by the poets John A Gard and Grace Nichols, and first, when they gave them to me, I thought it was for my 50th birthday, I think, and I thought what a strange thing to give me. And John, I think, was who explained that tortoises are much to be much, much admired. They're patient, they're slow, they get there, they get what they need. They've got a shell. They look after themselves. When people are after them, they just get inside their shells. And so it's very nice that carrying the elephant and picture of Eddie are propped up on John A Gard and Grace Nichols tortoise.

Chris Grimes:

Wonderful, and the fable that you talked about coming full circle. It's not the hair and the tortoise. There's lots to be said about being a tortoise. There is, there is, yes, yes.

Michael Rosen:

I don't think Lafontaine wrote a version of that. I think he wrote versions of various of the Esoc tables, but not that one. I'm not sure that is an Esoc. It probably is, yeah.

Chris Grimes:

I think the hair and the tortoise is classically sorry. Yeah, I think you're right, I've just suddenly realized I'm talking to a lecturer in.

Michael Rosen:

No, no, no, I do sometimes get my Esoc fables, and anyway nobody knows who Esoc was, so yeah, and now I'm going to award you with a cake.

Chris Grimes:

Please, mr Michael Rosen, lovely, obviously, I think you like cake, because you talked about one nom nom nom, and you do chocolate cake, obviously. So would you like a chocolate cake. What type of cake would you like?

Michael Rosen:

Actually I would like a piece of chocolate cake. I do every now and then have chocolate cake in between. Don't tell anybody this, can we keep this secret? Yes, I eat fruit cake. So chocolate cake, yes, I do like it, particularly if it's very dark and the the what do you call it? The spongy bit is actually sort of laced with chocolate in it. I believe it's called ganache, anyway. So ganache, chocolate cake, yes, bit rich to have sort of like regularly. So between fruit cake.

Chris Grimes:

Thank you, Fruit cake. And do we like fruit cake with a bit of cheese please?

Michael Rosen:

Which, no, I just take it neat with rather extraordinary. I don't drink tea or coffee, but I have fruit tea. So fruit cake with fruit tea, especially berry tea, often cranberry and raspberry. There we go. You can't get more specific than that, can you? So there we go Fruit tea and fruit cake.

Chris Grimes:

They are yours, if I am lucky enough to meet you again. By the way, we have met round about the time of you doing. There was a Viv B B Pertry Please event. That happened way off in the 1980s and we met. So four hours, yeah, four hours. Anyway, the cake is yours, the fruit tea is yours. Now you get to put a cherry on the cake in the form of what's a favourite inspirational quote that's always given you sucker and pulled you towards your future.

Michael Rosen:

I'm not sure I've ever had an always, but please don't laugh. But every night I play a song by Bob Dylan that is called just like Tom Thumb's blues, and this begins with the line when it's raining in Juarez and it's Easter time. No, when you're sorry, start again. The line is when you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter time too. So now you've got to imagine the younger Bob Dylan, and he's not only singing, he's also kind of pleading. Okay, so I can't really do this, but it goes something like this when you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter time too. Okay, it's not a very good imitation, no very good, I liked it.

Michael Rosen:

Thank you Very nice. Anyway, you think well, what's inspirational about that? Well, the song is about if you can say it's about anything with a Bob Dylan song about somebody having uncomfortable, uneasy memories, experiences, dreams, until he realises he has to get away and get back to New York City. And there's something about that song that in the last years got to me completely. I literally have to play it every night to just think about that way in which the kind of illness I've had Okay, I'll try not to get emotional now it's sort of cuts you loose, that's a sort of phrase that comes from sort of blues and Elvis Presley and so on Gonna cut you loose and that's connected with terrible things like slavery and coming out of the grim experiences of the South and the States gonna cut you loose.

Michael Rosen:

But there was a way in which I had the sense that I lost connection with the things that matter. I told you, you said you asked me what matters and I said this lovely family thing. Well, I didn't have that. In hospital there was a lockdown, nobody could come and see me. The first time I saw them all was they came in the garden when I was in a rehab hospital and that was just incredible, but that was. I was already been in hospital for two months, but when I came home, there was a way in which I wasn't the same as I was before, and so I was sort of cut loose from myself, yeah. So I think I'm playing this thing.

Michael Rosen:

So I've given you this fairly inconsequential line. When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter time too, and that's what Dylan can do he can give you pictures. Look at that. You're lost in the rain. It's a place called Juarez, which you know. For us over here, this side of the pond, we don't know where it is, but he's out of America. Do we know that? Juarez, mexico, I think. And it's Easter time too. Like that should be nice, that should be fun, but it isn't.

Michael Rosen:

And so you say well, how can that inspire you? Well, I tell you, it inspires me every night, not only to think about it, but also to write things. And in fact, what I've been doing is I've been creating a kind of late night tweets book. So every night, after I listen to this, I write a tweet poem like the one you know I'm trying to eat lettuce for the spoon, and I write these, and it's been inspired by this poem. So at the moment it's that line and also, of course, I know what's coming next in the song, and it has this incredible backing, you know, a mixture of guitar and piano and drum and bass, and it just that does it for me. So there you go. You may think, well, you know it's not very poetic or whatever, but the thing about Dylan is he can describe this dislocation which, for me, is where I'm at, a bit much, much less so than when I came out of hospital, but there is still a part of me that feels dislocated from the person I was.

Chris Grimes:

Almost a detethering or, as you say, a dislocation. Yes, yeah, thank you for showing that that's very profound indeed. Have you ever seen or met Bob Dylan?

Michael Rosen:

Seen him perform twice, once in 1965 or six, I don't remember which, and then again about five or six years ago.

Chris Grimes:

Yeah, Because it occurs to me you should, because of who you are, you should write to him and say how it affects you, because I think that's just such a wonderful when he wrote it.

Michael Rosen:

But the only problem with saying things like that to Bob Dylan is that he turns it all around because he's a very paradoxical, quirky guy. So I think there's a recording of him singing it, I think possibly in Liverpool or somewhere, and you can find it on YouTube. And I think somebody shouts something either after it or during it, and he stops and he says hey, man, hey, it doesn't mean anything. Well, you know, because, or it doesn't, it don't mean nothing or something like that. He says in his own voice and of course I know what he means he doesn't mean, it doesn't mean anything. He says don't try and make it mean something logical, don't try and unpack it so that it all fits neatly, because that's not how I write what I'm doing.

Michael Rosen:

I'm writing Well, use of clumsy phrase, mood music. I'm writing stuff. That is the mood, not the specifics. Don't worry what I mean when I say the sergeant adhams or you know other phrases that he's got in the song. Don't worry about that, it's just. What is that? What does that conjure up for you?

Michael Rosen:

So he writes so we talk about language. That language denotes that's when we say here is the table. But we also talk about language connoting. In other words, it has connotations. So if I say to you the table, well, the table that might come to your mind is the table you sat in when, next to when you were five. So it's got two elements to it Table, that is the general thing that we all understand the thing you buy, the thing you can go, you know tables, we know what tables are. And then there's your table, the table in your mind, the table you know at school or at home or whatever.

Michael Rosen:

Well, dylan, I think he's trying to write Connotive poetry and music, so don't worry too much, but just see what the connotations are. So when you're lost in the rain, he's saying well, go on, think about what it feels like when you're lost in the rain and don't worry about Juarez, that was my thing you could be. We're lost in the rain in Hyde Park or you know, in the middle of Manchester, don't worry about it. And then and it's Easter time too, you know it's got he's not saying think really about my Easter, think about your Easter. So live in the land of connotation. And I find that really, really important and interesting. Yeah.

Chris Grimes:

And how lovely. It don't mean nothing, but actually, profoundly, it means everything, because it means everything to you to help you reconnect.

Michael Rosen:

It's not denoting anything. It's connoting so it doesn't mean anything. It feels something I mean. Another one of his songs I keep playing is that one is got. It's got a chorus.

Michael Rosen:

You have to, you've got to serve somebody, I think it's called, and it's a set of repetitive lines about you may be this kind of person, you may be that kind of person, but you know you, you got it. You either got to serve the devil or you got to serve the Lord. They come from his religious phase. I'm not religious and I keep playing this thing because I keep thinking about these pictures he gives you of all these different kinds of people. In the end he's sort of almost trying to say the whole world is in this song and these people don't figure out what their destiny is.

Michael Rosen:

Now, of course, some people are religious about it. But it's all right, I can take that and I can thinking well, that's right, we don't know what our destiny is. It's going to be, you know, you may be a good guy, you may be a bad guy. You know I don't need to name names, but you know there's all sorts of people being in the news recently and people are struggling. You can see they're struggling with trying to figure out whether this person I'm looking at the name names is a good guy or a bad guy, and you can see them grappling with it. And Dylan sort of draws you into that through these, these incredible pictures. He says maybe don't worry about the exact detail, just think I'm talking about the whole world here. Great, great poet, wonderful, wonderful poet.

Chris Grimes:

Wonderful, and what's the best piece of advice you've ever been given is my next question.

Michael Rosen:

My dad. I once came back from school and I said the teacher we've just been doing, we used to be called R? I religious instruction. It then became R? E religious education, I think. Anyway, my day it was either called R? I religious instruction. My day it was either called R? I or scripture. My parents used to find it's quite amusing that I used to come back and say things from it and I said oh well, miss Mount says that we should be like Jesus. And Jesus said be meek, you see. And my dad went, got a bit sort of uppity about that, said be meek, be meek. And he walked around the house with chomping on be meek, be meek. And he said no, I'd say be curious. And he said Well, just go on asking questions about things you know, even when somebody's told you this is it? So, what is it you know. And so I think that's the probably the best piece of advice I've ever had is go on being curious about anything and everything you know. Just keep inquiring, keep learning, keep trying to find things out.

Chris Grimes:

And now, with everything that you've been through through modern history, recent history, particularly the whole gamut of everything you've been describing, what notes, help or advice might you proffer to a younger version of yourself?

Michael Rosen:

Younger version of myself, I think I thought, and probably did almost up until recently, that if you did something, that the outcome you must it must be kind of goal oriented, that you must know what the outcome is. You must want an outcome and if the outcome isn't good you're going to be disappointed. Even if the outcome is good you'll be really delighted. And I think I have spent my life being quite outcome oriented, which is okay. It has helped me do things and achieve things. But you have to give some space and time to things that aren't outcome oriented. You mustn't worry too much that everything's got a consequence and a phase that will happen after it. I mean, in a way, obviously in life everything does have a consequence, but just don't worry so much about it. And I think I have been sometimes always thinking oh well, if I do that, then that's what's going to happen. If I do that, oh, that might work. So, rather than just concentrating on the thing itself and just letting it be, I mean you know, there we go.

Michael Rosen:

We've got that wonderful piece of poetry from Paul McCartney Let it Be. You know he's described very profoundly that he had a dream of his mother and his mother standing in front of him saying Paul, let it be. What I take from that song is what I'm just trying to say now. There are times, instead of saying, right, I'm now going to lean over and pick up these glasses, oh no, I've dropped them, you're disappointed. Now I'm going to lean over and pick up the glasses. I've picked them up. That's brilliant, I've got the glasses. That's kind of goal oriented activity and you can. That could be writing a poem or it could be anything. But there are other ways when you can sort of sit in and, as Paul McCartney says, let it be. And that's hard. It's hard to do because you know we have to earn money and we have to get things done, we have to do the shopping, we have to wash up and all these things. And they're in a way though they're kind of very ordinary, they're goal oriented.

Michael Rosen:

Yesterday I went shopping. You know what I did? I forgot to get my wife the new potato she asked me to get. I came back and I said I've done the shopping, love. I got you the salmon. I got you that. She said yeah, and the new potatoes, and I said oh, and I could see she was disappointed. I said I'll go out again and she pleaded with me not to go. She said I'll have chips instead and she went to the freezer and got the chips. So you know these activities are goal oriented.

Michael Rosen:

That was a failure. I felt bad about it. I still feel a bit bad about it actually. No, no, I do. I do Because she was. I look, saw the look on her face. She was so disappointed. She planned salmon and new potatoes. That was her meal and I spoiled her image. You know herself. You know the things she'd planned for herself and that was a shame. So I fully understand that life is full of these. But there are other times when it's good to just sit in and not think this is going anywhere. So that's my advice to this 15 year old who is possibly thinking oh yeah, I'm training for this and I want to get in the team and I want to get in this play and that's great, that was lovely, it was a lovely enthusiastic sort of guy at 15. But other times I'd say just sort of sit there and see what happens. So there we are. So I'm going to take Paul McCartney's line. It's a great line, let it be you can't do it all the time, but just some of the time let it be.

Chris Grimes:

And we're ramping up to a bit of Shakespeare in a minute, but just before we get there and this is about legacy, which I'll explain in a minute, if I may now, this is the past. The golden baton moment, please. So, as you've experienced this from within, who would you most like or who would most enjoy a good listening to in this format? Would you say?

Michael Rosen:

Who would like to listen to this, this podcast?

Chris Grimes:

we're doing now. Who would you like to pass the golden baton on to, as to someone you think would like to have this experience within your network?

Michael Rosen:

Oh, I see, yes, who would do that? Well, I've met today for the first time a guy who calls himself MC Grammys. He is a performer and he is a stunning performer of rap for kids mostly. He has kids himself and he does bear hunt and he does all sorts of others. He is already mega. He's going to be mega. I am sure he has a huge future ahead of him. Wonderful young guy. As I say, he's already successful. So when you say someone's on the brink of success, it's a bit daft when they're already so successful. But he's a bit under the radar. I think he's doing stuff for Sky TV. You know he's doing a huge amount. He does stuff that goes viral immediately and I think he wanted to meet me because he's doing bear hunt and maybe there are some collaborations or collabs, as people call them.

Chris Grimes:

Get down with the kids.

Michael Rosen:

I love that Get down with yeah, he said he's going to teach me how to be streets. So yeah, so we had a lovely time sitting right here in this seat and he was just there and we had a great time and I think you could have great fun talking to him and you know, he's a wonderful young guy with a very interesting background and his heart is so totally in the right place and he's a fantastic performer. So there we are, mc Grammar, which I put a couple of dedications in a couple of books, and then, just to show how streets I am, instead of writing grammar as G-R-A-M-A-R, I wrote it as G-R-A-M-M-A, so in the London accent you say grammar. I know you've noticed this kind of it's called front formation.

Michael Rosen:

It's called in phonetics so it's a lot of speech. It sort of comes out the front of the mouth so you go yeah, grammar, my mother. So it's quite funny. You can hear it on a bus, I hear kids doing it. So when I wrote MC Grammar like that, he was so impressed. So there's me trying to kind of, you know, be streets and we're going to meet again. So we've got lots of lovely things that we'll probably do. So anyway, I hope you have some lovely fun talking to MC Grammar, very, very serious, very, very good fun. Fantastic performer. You can find his stuff on YouTube and if any of his other social media, other platforms are available and he is terrific.

Chris Grimes:

And so your mission, if you should choose to accept it is if you wouldn't mind furnishing with me with a warm introduction, then that will make it a bit easier.

Michael Rosen:

He doesn't have to say yes, yes, I will try to introduce you to MC Grammar.

Chris Grimes:

Thanking you, mc Rosen. Okay, now we're ramping up to a bit of Shakespeare. By the way, this is a really authentic prop. This is the actual complete works of Shakespeare. It's not a first folio. I'm not going there, you can see that it's really shiny. By the way, it looks like it's shiny, actually it says Chris Grimes. On there. It says in 1896, when I went to the Bristleovic Theatre School. And this is my actual well-thumbed complete work Fantastic Beautiful.

Chris Grimes:

Yeah, so it's not a first folio and he didn't sign it, but that was a great question. But, inspired by all the world's stage and all the men and women, merely players, I'd like to ask you about legacy and how, when all is said and done, michael Rosen, you would most like to be remembered.

Michael Rosen:

Someone who gave things to people that they found funny and interesting. There we are Quite ordinary. Yes, that's all I think I've done. When you write, you've got the initiative of the baton. You're surrendering things to people, you're handing them over for them to make of them what they will, and I think I just hope that they start conversations.

Michael Rosen:

So people do you know the loveliest thing that people say to me? They say, oh, we recite your such and such poem in the car. And quite often it's Bear Hunt, of course, which is lovely. I mean, it's a story I adapted. But when it's other poems, like Chocolate Cake and so on, or they go, every time we have Chocolate Cake, we go oh, the crispy icing on the top, the squashy icing in the middle, and I think, wow, could I have predicted that I would do something like that? And even the nice thing I mean I know it's mad, but the idea that people are going around going nice, or I get stopped in the street and people come to me and go it's the mean guy, am I? Well, in a way, I mean it's totally crazy, but it's lovely, isn't it?

Michael Rosen:

I did something with my son. He filmed me and I'm going oh, nice, and it's, it's become this thing. So any of it, any of the stuff, whether it's at that end, or if I do a radio show, like you know one went out this week about language and so on and people say, oh, that was you know, they write me letters that reminded me of, and then they send me a whole letter of how the program reminded them of something. And I think, well, that was the interesting bit. And another bit is where people say that like the nice bit makes them laugh. So yeah, that if I've given to people things that have they found funny or interesting, my cup overfloweth.

Chris Grimes:

Lovely. Where can we find out more and all about? I mean, it's fairly obvious, but where can we find out about Michael Rosen on the old interweb, please?

Michael Rosen:

www. Michaelrosen, or one word. Remember that Michael is spelled A-E-L, I don't mind, but the internet does so. Michael Rosen dot co. Dot, uk. So I'm there. That's my website, which I try to update every three months, and from there you'll find your way to my Twitter account, my Facebook account. What is your handle? Twitter handle is at Michael Rosen, yes, or one word at Michael Rosen, yes. And I'm on Facebook as Michael Rosen, so I'm spreading myself about. You can find me all there. I'm also on LinkedIn, so do feel free to follow me on LinkedIn. So there we are. That's where you can find me.

Chris Grimes:

As this has been your moment in the sunshine, Michael Rosen, here in the Good Listening, Two Show stories of distinction of genius. Is there anything else you'd like to say?

Michael Rosen:

Well, as you were quoting Shakespeare and you were asking about memorable quotes, I often think I've written down just to make sure I've absolutely got it right, because I'm a great one for muddling. Shakespeare quotes sort of end up saying to be or not to be. That is the cloud that you know. Suddenly, no, no, it's not a cloud, that is the question. You know, a las per cloud, no, yorick, and so on. So, dear old Prospero, as you know because you're a Shakespeare lover and scholar, so dear old Shakespeare wrote a play called the Tempest, and in the Tempest there is this strange figure. He's a magician, sorcerer, historian, slightly worrying character, because you know, he can conjure up storms, or at least he can get his slaves to do it, because he's trying to wreak revenge. So. But one of the things he can do is conjure up some players to put on a kind of pageant and after the pageant he turns to, I think, he's servant, I think to Ariel, who's a slave, really says we are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is is ended with asleep. No, he's rounded with asleep. There we are, told you, I wouldn't remember it. Our stuff, our dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with asleep. There you go, so notice, he says dreams are made on, not made of. We'll often get that quote wrong, so that's why I make sure to write these things down. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with asleep. Now I look at that and I think what does that mean? That we are made of stuff but we also make dreams that are based on our stuff? Yes, that's it. So we dream about. So we got this material stuff of the world and then we make up these dreams. That's what I've spent all my life doing, is what Shakespeare did, and we've just seen one of Shakespeare's dreams, this pageant so Prospero, shakespeare, shakespeare, prospero. And then he says and our little life is rounded with asleep, and that's that's. That's so beautiful, the idea.

Michael Rosen:

And this brings me back to dear Eddie, who died in his sleep, and that thing where the man said to me will you sign this piece of paper to let's put you to sleep? And I said will I wake up? He said 5050. And you know what I thought in that moment? I did think well, if I die, I won't know, it'll be like Eddie, I'll go to sleep and die, and I won't know about it and there won't be any pain, because a doctor did tell me that Eddie who died of meningococcal septicemia, he died of a form of sepsis and that he just would have faded away not knowing what happened to him. And that is a funny sort of relief for me that he didn't go through pain. And so when I read that, and our little life is rounded with sleep, it reminds me of these two moments of Eddie dying and then me being told well, you may die now, and of course one point I will.

Michael Rosen:

So you know, shakespeare is incredible, but it was. It didn't even get to 60. And he was writing this deep, profound stuff. I mean he died. I think it was 52, I think when he died, I mean, how did he know that? How did he know? And our little life is rounded with asleep, rounded it just sort of finished off around, like you make a pot and you round it with a sleep, beautiful, beautiful image. So there we are, that's, that's what I will leave you with, that we are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with asleep.

Chris Grimes:

So, ladies and gentlemen, you've been listening to me, chris Grimes, but most importantly, this has been Michael Rosen, the wonderful, gorgeous man that he is tuning next week for more stories from the clearing and a good night. You've been listening to the Good Listening 2 show here on UK Health Radio with me, chris Grimes. Oh, it's my son. If you've enjoyed the show, then please do tune in next week to listen to more stories from the clearing, and if you'd like to connect with me on LinkedIn, then please do so. There's also a dedicated Facebook group for the show too. You can contact me about the program or, if you'd be interested in experiencing some personal impact coaching with me, carry my level up your impact program. That's chrisatsecondcurveuk On Twitter and Instagram. It's At that, chris Grimes. So until next time for me, chris Grimes, from UK Health Radio, and from Stan, to your good health and goodbye. So, michael Rosen, you've just been here in the Good Listening 2 show, stories of Distinction and Genius. Can I get your immediate feedback on what that felt like to be curated through this?

Michael Rosen:

journey. That felt amazing, it was great. It was like sort of scouring out a pot and finding bits that I hadn't talked about before. I think, in particular a bit about being dislocated. I think that little bit. I shall watch that again and maybe write something about that about that sense that I'm dislocated from the person that I was. I've described it sometimes not being that person, sometimes described being precarious, but the fact that it's sort of like when a train's unlock yes. What's it called? What's it called when?

Chris Grimes:

they Declan. I know what you mean Uncoupling.

Michael Rosen:

Yeah, that's right. Uncoupling, uncoupled, decoupled, dislocated from. So sometimes I'm outside of it.

Chris Grimes:

And, if I may, another word that I have experienced recently when someone was talking about it was actually Lucy Brier's, Richard Brier's daughter who was talking about her mother's dementia and the great detethering oh yeah, You're detethered from your own sense of identity, which is the great tragedy, of course, of dementia.

Michael Rosen:

Yeah, yeah, that's right. So, anyway, that was nice to explore that and pull together many things from being very young to just something that happened 20 minutes before you, before we tuned in, when MC Grammar was sitting just behind this camera here, yes, so it's lovely to connect you to all up so that helps. You know anti-dislocation, you know whatever that is Anti-dislocation medicine. That's what we've done today, chris Anti-dislocation medicine.

Chris Grimes:

It's anti-disestablishmentarianism, exactly Anti-dislocation, et cetera. And, by the way, one other thing I forgot to say that I was very struck with in happily researching you was the sort of Odysseus-like epic quest of the coma, the fact you've been to the land of the dead and come back and how unusual and profound that is. And you wouldn't wish it on anybody but I'm so delighted that obviously that you made it back.

Michael Rosen:

You know yes yes, and it does sometimes feel like that. I mean I believe the word is gushed out Just to say there's a pattern, a schema, a sort of structure that you know. That helped me understand what it was. I can say I was in a coma, then I was semi-conscious, then I was fully conscious and then I've gone about my life and that's all fine. And then if I see it as Odysseus, going into the land of the dead and, you know, cheating the dog and kind of wandering around seeing all these dead souls and then coming out, I mean I've asked to go to the hospital, the rehab hospital. So I'm going on Monday because I want to make sure. You know it feels a bit like the land of the dead. So I want to just go and check. Yes, I'm going to go to the rehab hospital on Monday and have a look at where I was in bed and where I went to the gym and learned how to walk again.