I now know that as a child I was n't alone in secretly imploring the local library to stay open so that I could wander across the shelves for just a few more minutes. Please...A few more minutes...please...

Twice a week, Monday and again on Thursday, I'd put myself through the delicious ordeal of choosing two books to luxuriate in. The magnitude of that task - which book out of so many. An old friend, or something new ?

Then home to release those caged words and be taken away from the fact of a small, hilly Yorkshire village and into the boundless world of imagination that only books offer.

I had an accomplice, or perhaps, more aptly a fellow sufferer, a few miles further north in the same county, and a few years older. And I only found that out on Tuesday when I went to see the very cheerful poet Ian McMillan at the Barbican. He confessed to the very same affliction. Not alone. A fellow traveler. Hooray !

He has buried himself in words; I see him as either a very jovial miner breaking the surface with words stuck in his hair and fluttering from his face, or poking through like a dog snuffling truffles, a gem here, a treasure there.

Another South Yorkshire bookworm too, who loves the romance of a small village library, that words are more than symbols on a page, they are portals to other lives and other worlds.

The boy done well too. No doubt that they may have maddened him as they do all of us, that they'll not stay still, or don't look right, or fall apart at a touch, but words have n't abandoned him. Letters have n't swarmed overboard. He writes very well, and in that lovely effortless style, which you know is only that way because of long hours at the keyboard, pacing up and down, waiting, hoping, for the moment when a recalcitrant sentence finally behaves itself.

God, I admire him.