By all accounts, Philip Larkin (1922-1985), regarded as Britain’s greatest poet of the second half of the 20th Century, was a pretty strange & unpleasant character. Racist, bald & misogynistic, he produced most of the output upon which his reputation rests during the thirty years he spent as the librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull.

For philistines like myself, he’s remembered chiefly for two poems. I don’t think there’s anyone who cannot raise a smile at the opening verse of Annus Mirabilis: ‘Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three/(Which was rather late for me)/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP.’

However, I wish to take as my text for today the complete version of This Be The Verse:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

We learn from the media today that scientists at the University of California have been conducting research which tends to show that we inherit our capacity, if not interest, in exercise … or indeed the opposite … from our ancestors.

They began their work in 1993 with 224 mice and – in their findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that selective breeding, or even one day drugs, could improve the health (and fitness) of human beings by identifying those with ‘lazy’ genes. Professor Theodore Garland Jnr told reporters: “We have a huge epidemic of obesity in Western society, and yet we have little understanding of what determines variation among individuals for voluntary exercise levels.”

I was somewhat amazed this morning when, after reading of this study’s conclusions, I was able to recall a conversation I had over Sunday lunch with my parents in 1969 or 1970. In those days my position on the rugby field was that of flanker (or wing forward) and the topic of the moment was my likely future as a sporting god.

Even in those days I had a meek, or should that be realistic, view of my own abilities and announced that I would never make a top flight rugby player – at least in my current position – and that, in effect, this was my parents’ fault.

My thrust was that I may, or may not, have had the required innate playing ability but, at a shade under six feet tall, I was two to four inches too short to make my mark. In the same context – I went on – it would have helped enormously if the two to four inches extra had been primarily in the legs … because (I reckoned), being a short-arse had denied me the yard … or possibly two … of pace that would have allowed me to compete with the very best in getting around the field of play.

My thesis was that – there but for the grace of God [at that stage of my life I was unsure whether I believed in Him or not] – in the words of Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, “I coulda been a contender …”

My views haven’t changed much over the years. As I have detailed previously in this journal, I have lost count of the number of times that I have proposed to the RFU that they should set up a breeding camp – e.g. a luxury hotel in south-west London at which attractive young ladies with specific physical attributes should be sent to be ‘covered’ [as they term it in the horse racing industry] by certain males possessed of outstanding rugby ability, but who – through no fault of their own – nevertheless remain slightly deficient in the physique department as regards the very characteristics that said young ladies so obviously display.

All I have ever wanted to do - either on the field of play in my new position of fly half, or in any other manner in which the RFU and its coaching staff consider I might be of use – is contribute what I can to the cause of England rugby.