Six trustees and 14 members met up for an hour on a Thursday evening to introduce ourselves and have a bit of a Larkin chat, with glasses of wine and beer and cups of tea.
We came from across the country- London, Sheffield, Salisbury, Beverley, Hove (raining), Northampton, Dublin, Cirencester, Isle of Wight, Oxford, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Cornwall (sunny).

We packed a lot of Larkin discussion into an hour: We have written poems about Larkin; passed Larkin on the stairs; studied him at school; never studied him at all; read Aubade at Larkin’s grave; explored Larkin’s visit to the Isle of Wight; loved Andrew Motion’s biography; admired Larkin’s advocacy for librarianship; have been in the society from the start; enjoyed Don Lee’s birthday’s walks; learnt Larkin poems by heart; admired Larkin as an editor and a diplomat and loved his life as well as his poetry.
We enjoyed reading AL 57- it took us to Chichester even if we hadn’t been there for the event; it took us back to the Conference of Dec 2022; we agreed Clarissa was a super editor of About Larkin; started a bidding war over an unsent Rosemary Tonks letter found in a book; discussed the Cornish Maisie Day and watched the David Quantick speech on YouTube.

When it came to our favourite Larkin poem, there was not much of a consensus so just take your pick from the following: ‘Aubade’, ‘Afternoons’, ‘Toads’, ‘High Windows’, ‘The Explosion’, ‘When First We Faced’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘We Met at the end of the Party’, ‘At Grass’, ‘Mr Bleaney’, ‘Dublinesque’, ‘To the Sea’, ‘Broadcast’, ‘The Dance’.
Thanks all for coming along and especially to Rachael for being such a brilliant host.
See you at the next Meet the Members Zoom get together later in the year.