A wildcard to end. I heard a rumour that the personal anthology permits the occasional piece of writing that isn’t strictly a short story. This, I guess, is a poem. Or a prose poem. Or is it a song? Billy Bragg speaks his words over Johnny Marr’s guitar, and it is one of my favourite pieces of writing of all time. I wanted to round out this anthology where I started – with obsession. As, in my reading and writing, it is a topic that has always surrounded me, book-ended me. Here it is in all its glory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHrFkSeLukA

Included in A Lover Sings: Selected Lyrics, Faber and Faber, 2015