About this time of year I always long for mortar boards. What does September really mean if you don’t have a course of study to greet you? I can recreate that “new term” feeling with navy skirts and grey V-necks; I can whiten my plimsolls until the sight of them will make your eyes throb; sharpen my pencils to surgical-implement grade; but it’s not the same as sitting in a small seminar room where people are so excited about what they’ve just read they can barely breathe.

Fifteen years ago I frequented a café near Tottenham Court Road called Sidoli’s Buttery, aka Sid’s Butt. There I would sit with my fellow MA students discussing the antics and outputs of Henry (James), Walt (Whitman), Frank (O’Hara) and John (Berryman) as though they were our genius uncles. We were so proud! And we felt nothing short of love. With passion came responsibility. We thought nothing of reading for nine hours on the trot. We’d punctuate our reveries with orders for rock cakes. It was a wonderful life.

Feeling mildly dissatisfied and a little lacking in focus, not to mention lustre, recently it seemed to me there were a great many questions in my life to which the best answer was a three letter word: PhD. All atremble I sent an e-mail to my former English professor, and we arranged to meet the next day in the courtyard of the British Library. Silently we proceeded to an Italian café in a side road which claimed to be “Euston’s best-kept secret”.

“Euston is full of well-kept secrets,” I told my mentor. “Why, only the other day I was taken to this amazing basement bar that was all balding crimson velvet and show tunes, and when I went to the ‘ladies’ there were three women exquisitely dressed in silver feathers and sequins and old-fashioned chorus-girl garb, and I thought: ‘Please God, let this be the new fashion’, but when I went to join my friends in the bar I saw the three chrome poles and it didn’t seem so nice after that.”

“Gracious!” The professor answered. I fell silent.

I had come to the meeting straight from an unsuccessful bout of sofa browsing. I am trying to find a sofa that – how to put this? – doesn’t say a thing. That is neither traditional nor modern, modernist nor postmodern, clever nor witty, humble nor proud; not loud, yet certainly not forlorn. I want a sofa that has no language at all, or if it does, no language I can understand. It’s not that I wish to be baffled by my furniture, but I don’t want it defining me in any clear way. There needs to be mystery between us. I had been examining some splendid examples, the sort of things a 1970s Italian playboy might have considered futuristic, but it was all a bit loaded somehow. What I want from a sofa, I told my companion with a sigh, it will probably never ever be able to give me.

. . .

The professor was sympathy itself. “I want a sofa to make me feel how it felt to be fourteen and reading Middlemarch for the first time,” he said. I was deeply impressed.

We ordered tea and apple strudels that came hot with rosettes of piped cream. “I am wondering about doing a PhD,” I confided.

“You mentioned that. Would you be able to fit it in?”

“What would it need: 20 hours a week for three years?”

“That would probably be enough, yes.”

“If I got up a couple of hours earlier? I suppose it would be a bit like having another job, only one where you had to pay to do it.”

“And you’d be doing it because? I mean, you should probably only do it if you can’t not.”

“Well, what if I did it because there were lots of other things I really, really, didn’t want to do?”

“You wouldn’t be the first.”

I tell him about a friend of mine – the director of an architecture school – who admits a certain amount of pupils each year who are fleeing the military service required of them in their native lands.

“Would it be John Berryman you’d be studying?” the professor asked.

“Yes, I’d like to bring him back into fashion.”

“You could focus on the reception his work received, maybe?”

“It would be the height of luxury,” I said dreamily. “A huge treat for me.”

“Would it make more sense to write a film about him? It might be more fun for you.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing, really.”

“No harm in that. It’s all possible.”

“Thanks.”

I chased the last sultanas round the plate with the back of my spoon. “Do your students still go to Sid’s Butt to discuss things?”

“No, it shut down, or at least it’s under new management.”

My face must have fallen because the next thing he asked me was, “Would that make a big difference?”

“It just might,” I conceded. “Although this place” – I gestured around the room – “is pretty nice. Can we meet again soon to discuss this a bit more, discuss Berryman a bit, even?”

“We can.”

susie.boyt@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/boyt