If I feel uncomfortable about the question it’s because I feel uneasy about the implications of my answer. I acknowledge that car adverts, TV sitcoms, Shakespeare and George Lucas, body-piercing jewellery, Bollywood movies, Pinter and Stoppard, Polaroid photography, Harry Potter and Philip Roth, punk, house, hip-hop, rap, acid, Keats and Bob Dylan, the Andrews Sisters and the late works of Beethoven are all part of our culture and sit side by side in the supermarket, waiting for the consumer to pick and mix according to their taste, but I don’t believe that they should all merge into a muddy soup of relativism. In short, I think some of them are better than others and it’s sentimental thinking to argue otherwise. It’s pointless egalitarianism which irritates all parties – the curators of low culture despise the intellectuals for sucking up to them, and the mandarins of high culture are infuriated by the invasion of the barbarians.

Anyway, the aims and ambitions – and achievements – are utterly different. The comparisons are meaningless: we shouldn’t be asking whether Keats is better than Bob Dylan, but is Keats better than Shelley? Is Bob Dylan is better than Paul Simon? Is Picasso a challenging and subversive painter and Warhol a phenomenon of the market?

I fell in love with popular culture and am perfectly happy to prosely­tise for whole shedloads of popular music from Elvis to Amy Winehouse, or TV series from Bilko to Gavin and Stacey, or the novels of Mickey Spillane, Ross MacDonald, Sara Paretsky, James Lee Burke, Ian Rankin, or .?.?. I protest too much. Still, I can see all too easily how my – what to call it? – excessive fastidiousness can be construed as a form of snobbery; how my preference for “high” art over “low”, for the “elitist” over the “demotic”, is a clear revelation of a class-bound view of humanity.

But while it’s true that my upbringing was in most senses a highly privileged one (I never had to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night and lick the road clean with my tongue), I grew up in a rural backwater miles from any cinema, even further from any theatre, in a house where the paintings were of horses and the books were of war, and I was (pace Neil Kinnock) the first member of my family in 1,000 generations to attend a university. So I acquired “culture” in the sense that T.S. Eliot (“I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have no culture.”) meant it, slowly and entirely of my own volition.