There were about twenty persons in the big room, sitting in a wide circle and giving me the feeling that they were at once welcoming and wary. There were women and men, most in their twenties, all casually dressed in styles that flowered in the late 1960s. Through the tall windows was a roughly cut back wilderness, the ruin of what had been the spacious garden enclosing a London gentleman's residence in the plummy years of Victoria's reign. Not much furniture in the room: chairs and floor cushions, a threadbare carpet, nothing else. A chair was left empty for the visitor in the circle, centre stage it seemed as I sat in it and was introduced by the staff member who had got me into this.

I was there because I taught literature, to talk about Ash-Wednesday. I was working on Eliot at the time, and that seemed as good a poem as any for a group of people who, by their own account, did not know much about poetry. This was not a class or any kind of teaching situation. They were not students. And my chair was not centre stage – all points on a circle are equal. Moreover, it was their circle and their way of arranging themselves in this room.