Shapes of Life

"For more than four decades," claim the BBC, "Jack Rosenthal wrote rueful, often comic accounts of the events that shape our lives."

Well, I don't remember reading his account of mad-eyed teenagers lost in the Amsterdam red light district, work in a wing-mirror factory waiting on Monday, fourteen pints and a fight the next Friday, ambling from Police stations with stolen popcorn, hilarious, amphetamines and stowing away on ferries, foodless for three days before being puked up onto parental lawns, singing a melody from the sixties about the dreaminess of stars, with a soaking book of poems wedged under an arm, and howls of hope butchered from their hearts forever. And now it's too late for those events, and the shape of those lives, to meet his pen: "Jack Rosenthal died last weekend aged 72."

The BBC likes cosy little fictions about the Nation, such as Jack's - they're necessary to imply a common experience, which means the common fee we pay that funds the institution seems fair. So it's fitting that whatever berk I partly pay to copy-edit their webpages has Jack's favourite book down as the non-existent Finnegan's Wake, by James Joyce.