"But," he once again sighed, "poetry is dismissed as an eccentric pursuit. If it were not so, John Humphrys would put as much effort and preparation towards harassing some cultural charlatan as he does towards making a political double-dealer squirm."

I laughed. The thought of the  Today programme giving poetry the serious attention it dedicates to the clichés of leading politicians is frankly absurd. It is also, however, as Hill implies, deeply depressing.

If there is an answer it lies, of course, in our schools. We returned to Hill's childhood. "At the time, that county high school seemed a very ordinary school, but what seemed ‘ordinary' then appears extraordinary now. Its loss," he said slowly and sadly, "has been a dreadful national deprivation and degradation."

"I know," I said, "I have spent the last 20 years trying to do something about it and got nowhere." We looked at each other and laughed. The absurdity of us sitting in the middle of Noah's flood, pontificating about education when fine teachers across the country are forced to conform to the doctrine of "Relevance and Accessibility" must have hit us simultaneously.

For a while, we sat in silence. I had no idea what Geoffrey was thinking. I was lost in a vivid memory of a sunny June afternoon in 1968. I should have been revising for my finals, but, bored, I'd taken a few hours off and was wandering round Bath. By chance I went into a bookshop and picked up a copy of Geoffrey's magnificent second book of poems, King Log.

Maybe I am "wired weird" too, but I can only compare the experience to falling in love. There was the same sense of wonder and excitement and mystery, the sense, as Geoffrey himself has put it, of being "brushed past, or aside, by an alien being". I bought the book and over the intervening years have bought every subsequent book Geoffrey has written. I count his poetry and now, towards the end of our lives, his friendship, as one of the greatest blessings I have been lucky enough to receive.

He looked up. "Could you bear," he asked, "to watch another episode of Prime Suspect?" "Of course," I replied. Politics, education and poetry might be in a mess, but "H Mirren", as Geoffrey once put it in a poem, "is super".