In the Evening Standard today, the poet Ruth Padel is described as ‘the only household name’ left in the race to become Oxford Professor of poetry. I’m sure Padel is an excellent poet, and a perfectly good candidate for the chair, but despite all this, she is not a household name; I would go so far as to say that there isn’t one in the whole wide world of contemporary poetry, and hasn’t been since Pam Ayres stopped appearing on television with any regularity. What proportion of UK households could name the new Poet Laureate, or the old one, or any of them?

Household name recognition is difficult to achieve for any writer. I know, from the conversations I’ve had over the years with people from all areas of life, that I am a long way from achieving this distinction: anyone who has ever been published will recognise the question ‘Should I have read any of them?’ (The ‘should’ indicates the sense of moral obligation people feel when it comes to books; it is invariably used, like the Latin word ‘num’, to introduce a question expecting the weary, mumbly answer ‘No’.) I still remember an Observer article (on the news pages!) from a few years ago, which confidently predicted that a minor British novelist would become a household name by the end of the year, after a production company belonging to a famous British director bought the film rights to her novel. As if!

Who can name the author of, say, ‘Sideways’? Or ‘The Graduate’? Or the book that became ‘Slumdog Millionaire’? (The film that so excited the Observer’s arts correspondent never got made, by the way.) Certainly the films of ‘High Fidelity’, ‘Fever Pitch’ and ‘About A Boy’ haven’t helped slake my unquenchable thirst for global recognition. Indeed, I once found myself involved in a mortifyingly undignified argument with the person sitting next to me on a plane, who disputed my claim that I’d written ‘High Fidelity’. ‘I’ve watched that movie loads of times,’ she said. ‘If it was a book, I’d have noticed on the credits.’  I am used to anonymity; being called a fantasist was a new low.

Shakespeare is a household name, and Dickens; Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes are more likely to illuminate light-bulbs than the names of their creators. Who else? Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton, maybe Austen. It’s a very select list. None of this means very much. Plenty of people are reading, and, more importantly, plenty of people can read; this is all that matters, in the end. But when newspapers start describing somebody as a ‘household name’ when that name is known to maybe a five-figure section of the population, it’s a sure sign that they have lost touch with reality.

…are trying to guess who might be given the job of Poet Laureate, but I am yet to read an article explaining why on earth any poet would want the job in the first place. A few weeks ago, Andrew Motion, the current Laureate, confessed that he’d felt blocked and unable to write for a while. But if, as many writers think, a block comes from a lack of confidence, then it’s no wonder he’s been unable to produce very much: one of the chief drawbacks of the job is that every poem written to mark royal occasions is roundly and gleefully mocked. Motion was obliged to write a poem celebrating Prince William’s twenty-first birthday (perhaps unwisely, he chose to do it as a rap), and the Queen’s diamond wedding anniversary; many of his peers were terribly unkind about the results. Ted Hughes, his predecessor, produced one commemorating the marriage of Prince Andrew and Fergie  (‘A helicopter snatched you up/The pilot, it was me.’) and another one about the Queen’s corgis.  The next Laureate may well have to produce lines commemorating the marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton, or even, God help him or her, the wedding of Prince Harry and Chelsy (sic) Davey. How could any ego, let alone one of the delicate literary variety, survive the kicking that such verses will inevitably receive? The list in the Times yesterday included some of my favourite contemporary poets – Wendy Cope, Carol-Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage –  and I fervently hope that they all turn the post down.