We start with some unfinished business: I had a couple of interesting discussions last week, of matters arising out of my reflections about the ‘responsibility’ (if any) of a film-maker to stick to the facts. (And I do believe this is a responsibility particularly of film-makers: the medium itself always feels to me documentary, in contrast to, for example, the theatre – but that’s a topic for another post (which I think I may have written two years ago).) Let me just share a couple of points that emerged from one or two of those discussions.

Although Spielberg appears to argue that The Fabelmans is very faithful to the facts, should we perhaps be warned by that choice of family name – ‘fable-man’?

I suggested last week that Bernard Delfont’s descendants might want to sue for the misrepresentation of his character in Stan and Ollie. It has been pointed out to me that English law does not recognize defamation of character of the dead, because defamation, whether it is libel or slander, is a personal action which cannot be assigned or brought on someone’s behalf. The reason for this principle is quite simple: defamation is an act or statement that damages a person’s reputation and, once you are dead, you are taken not to have a reputation in legal terms that is capable of being damaged. So there! Contrary to popular opinion, you should apparently speak ill only of the dead.

Perhaps I’ll leave the last word on this to Prince Harry: not immediately relevant, but I believe it captures this particular moment in time: ‘My memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there is just as much truth in what I remember, and how I remember it, as in so-called objective facts.’ Very post-modern! The trouble for me, dear reader, is that, as someone who tends to bang on a bit about artistic truth, I have an immense amount of sympathy for that sentiment, despite my best efforts not to. Of course, where Harry got it wrong was in the classification of the 400-page brick that he has just thrown through the window of Buckingham Palace.

We read last week that Spare broke all records for first week sales in British publishing, becoming the best-selling non-fiction work in British publishing history. And, of course, there’s the rub: it’s patently not a work of non-fiction. What Harry has written is an autobiographical novel, based on his memory, his subjective experience, of his life, and telling his truth. All very legitimate: all he needed to do was change the names, and he could have been up there with James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – and D H Lawrence – Sons and Lovers. Had he taken that path, winning the Booker Prize could have been his path back to Britain. What a missed opportunity!

More unfinished business: Israel’s internal political situation is not, you may have noticed, more settled than two weeks ago, when I gritted my teeth and went all serious. Part of me feels I really should revisit this topic today, but, to be honest, I prefer to channel my inner ostrich and bury my head in the sands of something of no significance whatsoever.

So, with your indulgence…

Bernice and I received a gift from friends this week, the Book Lover Magnetic Poetry Kit. This is a box of 200 small fridge magnets, each with a single word printed on it. (We actually received two gifts: the other was a set of silicon muffin cases. Our friends were at pains to stress that each of the gifts was to be shared, but we all know who’s going to bake the cakes and who’s going to rearrange the words, don’t we?) The bizarre idea of the magnetic poetry kit is that you should use the word tiles to build a text – on your fridge or any metal cabinet.

I say ‘bizarre’ because, if you were setting out to write a poem, you probably wouldn’t start by restricting your vocabulary to 200 words chosen by someone else. And yet, and yet…

The day after receiving the gift, I found myself spilling the tiles out onto the dining room table and starting to play. (By the way, if you are given a set of these yourself, allow plenty of time for what I have lightly dismissed as ‘spilling the tiles out’. The rubber-backed magnetic tiles stick to each other in convivial clumps and need to be separated, spread out and, in many cases, turned over. Bearing in mind that the tile that displays the word ‘a’ is only 8mm by 8mm, this is a fiddly job, particularly if, like me, you are blessed with short, stubby fingers.)

Anyway, ten minutes later, having had a chance to gain a superficial familiarity with at least some of the 200 words spread before me, I cast about for inspiration. Speaking as someone who has spent many an hour staring at a blank sheet of paper, I can say that the tiles did not take very long to work their strange alchemical magic.

I believe I have written before about the fact that, as a twelve-year-old schoolboy, the most dreaded sentence I ever heard from my English teacher was: ‘You can write an essay on any topic you want.’ This was for me always the signal for my mind to drain of any thought whatsoever. What I wanted to hear the teacher say was something like: ‘I want you to write a story that includes a 60-watt lightbulb, a ferret with a wooden leg, and a bowl of custard.’

After only a few moments of letting my eyes wander over the vocabulary spread before me, I noticed a ‘through’ and a ‘step’…and I was off. Twenty minutes later, I was able to transfer to our metal front door the following poem (untitled, for reasons that will become clear later):

Now, I know it’s not Milton, or Auden, but I think it works, despite the extraordinary limitations imposed. (Full disclosure: as the more eagle-eyed among you will have spotted, my kit does not contain the word ‘door’, which I felt was absolutely needed, so I improvised it from ’do’ and ‘or’. I do recognize that this is cheating, and, indeed, is only one step away from creating a poem using words built from only the 26 letters of the alphabet, but I hope you will allow me this one indulgence. I promise, henceforward, I will play by the rules.)

I feel that I learnt a couple of things from this first attempt. Most significant is that the combination of an active and racing brain, open to boundless opportunities, and 200 tiles, with words chosen by someone else, is extremely powerful: the very limitation helps to control the febrile imagination in a constructive way.

Of course, I’m not sure it would have worked with Robin Williams, the febrility of whose imagination was completely uncontrollable. Here he is not being subdued by Johnny Carson in 1987. (Parts of this interview are a little more explicit than Johnny, or his producers, would have wanted, so some of you may prefer not to click the link.)

The second feature of the kit is that it lends itself to the creation of shape poems. In case you’re not familiar with the concept, here is The Mouse’s Tale (d’ya gettit?) from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

The fact that the tiles can be moved so easily makes it easy to use variable spacing, and to experiment with different patterns of layout.

Finally, the process of ‘creating’ a ‘poem’ from the tiles requires you to focus on each individual word. Every word involves a search through the array on the dining-room table, and that makes the selection of each word a very conscious process.

At this point in my musings I started worrying about the criteria the manufacturers had used for selecting their final list of 200 words. So, I laid the tiles out again and started documenting them (I know, I know! I really do need to get out more. Still, I do all this stuff so that you don’t have to; it’s a form of public service.)

Here is the table of 194 unique words (six of them appear on two tiles each). You will see that they include 10 tiles with common suffixes (and one prefix) to help form verb tenses and plurals. The process of taxonomy is not entirely straightforward, because there are, in English, so many homonyms and so many words that can function as more than one part of speech.

One of the things that emerges from this list is that, to justify the label of Book Lover in the branding of the tiles, a hefty chunk of the nouns are book words, many of which do not particularly lend themselves to poetry: library, book, volume, spine, chapter, page, fiction. In addition, many of the subject areas that are most widely represented in poetry have been entirely neglected: there is no mention of nature in this list. Also absent is any reference to family relationships, which meant that there was no way I could call my poem To a Child, which is probably what I would have chosen.

If you find yourself at a loose end this week, you might like to consider what your list of 200 essential words for writing poetry would be…or you might not. It’s not in the exam.

Meanwhile, in Portugal, Ollie, at six months, faces challenges even more daunting than composing a poem using only 200 words selected by someone else. (Don’t adjust your volume; this is a silent movie.)