Christina Patterson: The challenge of poetry – and football

It's so weird. Grown men dressed like two-year-olds, throwing themselves on the ground and shouting. One minute they're weeping and the next they're practically snogging. All those funny lines on the field. All those logos on their backs. I just don't get it.

I did watch Bend it Like Beckham, even tried to follow that bit when they explained the off-side rule with the salt and pepper pots, but I just kept thinking how skinny Keira Knightley was and how she had a sweet, but slightly simian smile. The trouble with football, you see, is that it's too complicated.

It's possible, of course, that the trouble is me. It's possible that, in order to appreciate the fancy footwork of a Pele or a Best, or the balletic leap of a Banks or a Seaman, it might help to have a rudimentary grasp of the rules, might help, even, to have watched the odd game. It's possible, but the simple truth is that I just can't be bothered. I'd rather see a film, or read a novel, or a poem.

In this, I am clearly unlike Joanna Lumley, who would rather do a lot of things – perhaps, even watch a football match – than read a modern poem. Most contemporary poetry, she says, in the preface to a book of poems by her friend, Liz Cowley, is "maddeningly self-indulgent" and "obscure". "It is a rare modern poem," she writes, "that achieves the balance between being challenging and accessible." The author, she adds approvingly, "would never dream of describing herself as a 'poet'. She even dislikes the very word 'poetry' because she feels there is a divisive ring to it."

Indeed. Let's ban the word "poet". And, while we're about it, let's ban the word "footballer". It always makes me feel nervous, makes me feel that I might be moving into territory in which I'm not absolutely, fabulously familiar, territory which might limit my capacity to pontificate with panache. In fact, never mind the words. Let's ban poetry. Let's ban football. Let's ban everything that takes its practitioners years to learn and its audience more than two seconds to understand.

Weirdly, frustratingly, I see tiny tots in the park, playing this game I don't understand, yelling out when balls go into nets, screaming about punishments and "penalties". It's because they're stupid, of course. Too stupid to see that they're wasting their time on something maddeningly self-indulgent, and too selfish to see that I don't get it.

There are children reading poetry, too, and some are even writing it. Some of what they write doesn't rhyme or scan and Joanna Lumley wouldn't like it. Some of it doesn't rhyme or scan and it's rubbish. It's a perfectly nice collection of words arranged perfectly nicely on a page, but they're just words on a page. They are to poetry what me kicking a cushion behind the sofa is to football.

But quite a lot of children – thanks to teachers who don't share Joanna Lumley's views, and visits from published writers who don't mind calling themselves poets, and to these oblong things Boris Johnson mentioned last week called books – are learning to arrange words on a page (words which don't rhyme or scan) in a way which can make you gasp, a way, even, that can give you what the poet Robert Frost called "a lump in the throat".

I can't tell Joanna Lumley how to recognise a poem. Wordsworth described it as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings". Seamus Heaney said it was "language in orbit". The poet Peter Porter has said it's "either language lit up by life or life lit up by language". All I can say is that I know it when I see it. Which, I gather, is what quite a lot of people say about something called a goal.

Anne's fashion faux pas

So, you've got to go to another bloody wedding, and you dig out a frock you haven't worn for a while (that long? gosh, you have got good memories, could make one your special subject on Mastermind, in fact) and all hell breaks loose.

OK, so it's great you're still quite nice and slim, great that that horsey face has softened, but apparently all this recycling stuff doesn't apply to you, you're meant to be some kind of champion for the fashion industry, setting an example by never wearing the same thing twice. You spend your entire life making small talk to boring people, and promoting charities like St John Ambulance and the Wooden Spoon Society, and all you get is a lot of gyp. You know what? It's a dress.

* The miracle, of course, is that short, balding, bearded near-pensioners manage to find new sexual partners at all, but that they manage to hook up with "stunnas" (to use the technical term) 30-odd years younger on, apparently, a regular basis might, to the average woman, seem a feat on a par with yesterday's handshake between Morgan Tsvangirai and Robert Mugabe. But, as stalwart stud Salman Rushdie continues, kindly, to remind us, they do.

A year on from his separation from Padma Lakshmi, the writer has declared, in the New York Times, that he is "totally eligible, single and available" and has underlined the fact by being seen with a succession of young starlets. Among them are Scarlett Johansson, who Rushdie is said to have described as "very, very hot". Clearly, the kind of finely nuanced critical verdict that only a Booker prizewinner can deliver.

c.patterson@independent.co.uk