How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S14, Ep5 How To Fail: Michael Rosen

Episode Date: June 8, 2022

My sound engineer Chris is a lovely man, but he is not easily impressed. After an interview, if Chris says 'yeah, that was good' I know I've struck GOLD. Today's episode garnered TWO SEPARATE 'yeah that was good'(s) from Chris which is why I know it's a very special one. And of course it would be, because my guest is the truly wonderful Michael Rosen. He is the author of more than 200 books, including some of the most beloved children’s stories of all time. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is one of his, a book which is now (terrifyingly) over 30 years old. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, Michael was one of the first to be hospitalised. He spent 47 days in Intensive Care, some of them in an induced coma and on a ventilator. He returned home in June to discover that his poem, These Are The Hands, had become a viral anthem for NHS care workers.He joins me to talk about all of this, as well as his failures in cricket, academia and health. In one of the most moving conversations I've ever had on this podcast, we also talk about the death of his beloved son Eddie from meningitis at the age of 18 and how Michael still feels (misplaced) guilt over what happened.Thank you Michael for being so open and vulnerable. This is a wonderful listen - but do have tissues nearby.--Michael's latest book, Please Write Soon: a story of Two Cousins in World War II is out now an available to order here: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Please-Write-Soon-by-Michael-Rosen-author-Michael-Foreman-illustrator/9780702303180--How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [e-mail]--Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod Michael Rosen @michaelrosenyes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned

from failure. My guest today has written more than 200 books, including some of the most beloved children's stories of all time. We're Going on a Bear Hunt is one of his, a book which is now over 30 years old and yet still retains its ability to entertain and charm new generations. An author, poet, teacher and broadcaster, he served as Children's Laureate from 2007 to 9. He is, of course, Michael Rosen. Rosen was born in Harrow, Middlesex. His parents, both teachers, told him that on the night he made his appearance into the world, the church next door to their home burned down. Whether that was an auspicious sign or not, Rosen went on to become an avid reader and writer as a child.

He wrote poems from the age of 12 before studying English at Oxford. After that, he joined the BBC and wrote his first book, Mind Your Own Business, in 1974. Passionate about the role that books play in early development, Rosen has worked as a writer-teacher for much of his life, visiting schools several times a month. He's also Professor of Children's Literature at Goldsmiths University. I'm not sure what he'd make of the term national treasure, I'll have to ask him, but he was rapidly approaching that status when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Rosen was one of the first to be hospitalised in March 2020. He spent 47 days in intensive care, some of them in an induced coma and on a ventilator. He returned home in June to discover that his poem, These Are the Hands, had become a viral

anthem for NHS care workers and that the hashtag Get Well Soon Michael had been trending on Twitter. well soon Michael, had been trending on Twitter. His work is an unmitigated success, but what does Michael Rosen, now 75, think of failure? I make hundreds of mistakes, he once told the British Library. Really, they are just trying something out. Michael Rosen, welcome to How to Fail. Well, thanks for having me, Elizabeth. Thank you. How do you feel about that term national treasure? I sort of put my tongue in my cheek and raise my right eyebrow. It's very nice, I know people mean it well so I by no means reject it, I just sort of think well that's their decision you know but as I say the tongue is firmly in cheek. So that quote that I

read out at the end was from an interview that you gave to the British Library, and it was specifically about making mistakes in your writing. So how important do you think failure is to writing? Oh, it's crucial. The way I put it is that all play, but certainly play in writing, has to be a kind of trial and error without fear of failure. So you must feel that it's okay to fail and to make mistakes. So if I could hold up a page, if you can imagine that in this interview, a page of my writing, and you'll see it's just full of scribbles and scribblings out and corrections. And that's the way to write because you're experimenting, trying things out, seeing whether this matches that, whether this works with that.

If you're writing a rhyming poem, then you'll try lots of different rhymes and see whether that helps. You switch things around. And in a way, those are all mini failures, which you're trying out and saying, doesn't quite work. So I'll try this or that. So I think failure, I mean, we shouldn't really call it failure. It is experimentation and finding what works, but I don't mind in a sense, we can call them little mini fails and we should feel free to do it. So it's not as if somehow or other your ego's on the line and that every time you don't quite manage to rhyme a word or you don't quite manage to get the rhythm right that you've got to give up your life, you just think, no, I'll just switch it around. And the more confident you get at it, the less you mind that

you screw up a bit. I love that. Experimentation is absolutely at the core of everything, I think. Is that something that your parents encouraged? I mean, you talked about play there, and I feel that what makes you such a great writer, and particularly someone who's such a great children's writer, is that you seem to have a very vivid recollection of what it is to be a child and what it is to play in a world almost unfettered by expectation. Was that something that your parents gave you? I think with my parents, they were slightly different, as all parents are, that my mum was amazing in regard to failure and, if you like, thinking about how it's okay to play all the time and learn through play. My dad was a bit more prescriptive. He quite liked things to be done

properly. I have to say he was a bit sort of divided about it. So he would always agree with the principle that my mum was pursuing. I mean, she was pursuing it, I have to say, theoretically. I mean, she did study, if you like, the play principle in primary education. She did end up lecturing on it. And my dad kind of agreed with her. But when it actually came to me and my brother, he did end up lecturing on it. And my dad kind of agreed with her. But when it actually came to me and my brother, he did tend to be quite prescriptive and tell us what we should be doing and what we should be reading. And if I wrote something, you know, he'd say something like, keep trying. Whereas my mum would go, oh, that's lovely, Michael. You know, so there was a sort of

slightly hard cop, soft cop about the pair of them. And so I think I've taken the principles that I work on in this way, the way we've just been talking about it now, largely from my mum, whereas a lot of the more theoretical stuff I take from my dad. Your dad was in the American army in Germany, but then he returned home. the American army in Germany, but then he returned home. And you at 75, I imagine slightly too young to remember the Second World War, but the war and the impact of war more generally on humanity, it's a recurring theme in your work, isn't it? Yes, I was born in 1946. I think my dad was toing and froing between Germany and Britain. I suppose he must have been given that I was born, if you get what I'm saying. Oh, yes. Yes, that's right. I didn't have to spell that out, did I? So I think anybody who was brought up in that era, so say 46, and then you go through your childhood, if you think about it, 1950, I was four, you know, and then 1960, I'm 14. So that era, which is so influential and so affecting in your mind, was full of war stuff.

And it came to us in a variety of ways. There were movies, there were radio programs, there were newspapers. And then there's the impact of your parents and your friends' parents and other relations talking about it, your parents and your friends' parents and other relations talking about it, seeing injured people in the street, people with medals and with lost limbs. And so that whole era was affected by the war. But at the same time, you know, it was quite strange because you could easily live in that period and think that Britain had won the war. It was rather strange the way it was described. And so, yes, I can't possibly be not affected by it.

And I've missed out the geography. So that's to say, walking around London when I was a kid and taken places, you would see bomb damage. You would see shrapnel marks on the sides of houses from bombing. So all of that was all very immediate. And then in the case of my own parents, my father would say that he had two uncles who lived in France, and they were there at the beginning of the war, and they weren't there at the end. And then he would also wave slightly vaguely and say, I had relations in Poland. And there was indeed the figure of his

cousin who we would see at weddings and so on. And he was pointed out and very discreetly pointed to us as someone who never saw his parents again, because he was put on a train and it's rather poignant. It's all happening now to what is now called Lviv, which was called then Lemberg or Lwów in Polish. It was in Poland. It was in Poland. And then he was seized by the Russians. So this is how poignant it gets. Taken to a labor camp in Russia and only survived because the Germans invaded first eastern Poland and then Russia. And there was an army that was set up that he could join called the Polish Free Army. And then he came with that army as a refugee to Britain. So there's a lot of echoes from then to now, if you like. Well, also the echoes work both ways. When I see stuff going on now, it sort of reverberates back into the stories of the family, what went on in the family. And you've used that story as an inspiration for your latest book,

Please Write Soon, which tells the tale of two cousins, one of whom experiences exactly that in Poland. And I was so moved by it, even though I know I'm not the target audience, because you have relayed almost exactly what the story of my mother-in-law's family was. They had exactly that story. And her parents were forced to march to a gulag. They were forced into a labour camp. They lost two children during that time. They ended up in Persia. He joined the Polish Free Army and my mother-in-law's mother ended up in a refugee camp in Jaffa, where my mother-in-law was born. And it was so astonishing to see that on the page. And I think that you've made it so clear why it's important that these

stories keep getting told, particularly for the younger generation. Do you see that as part of your role on this earth? Well, it's quite interesting. Mostly, my writing has documented in a kind of humorous and slightly ironic way, the kind of childhood I had, which was a suburban childhood with two parents who were a little bit kind of fishes out of water. And I've enjoyed playing around with that. But then for this one, I sort of for the first time in fictional form, I'd done it in documentary form before, but fictional form, explored back to the five years before I was born. And the moment I did that, then this story of what was going on in London and relatives here thinking about relatives there came to me as this poignant separation that effectively the Rosens were spread out,

some in America, some in France, some in Britain, some in Poland. So it spread out. And so I've picked out the rosin who's here, namely my dad and his mum. My dad didn't see his dad because he was in America. You get the point. And then the Polish end. I've written about the French end in a more documentary way and also in my poems. But this way, it sort of felt that I did have a responsibility, a responsibility to get it right and a responsibility to feel it. And that's quite hard. It's a form of historical fiction, if you like.

And when you write historical fiction, I mean, I've interviewed Hilary Mantel and it's breathtaking when you talk to somebody like Hilary Mantel, the kind of research, the kind of texture that she's looking for in her work to try and make it both immediate and relevant. holding a mug that is made of pewter or whether it's the way the grass or the flowers grow, where someone has fallen over or the cobbles where poor old Thomas Cromwell's been slapped by his dad, you know, been thrown onto the cobbles. She has to get all that right. And she inspired me when I was writing mine to get it right, to get the fact that the London cousin in the book, who's sort of based on my father, that, you know, he goes to Highbury, he goes to Arsenal, and he gets the name of the players right. And I looked up what the scores of the matches were

so that the London cousin, Solly, can tell Bernie what the score was. I suppose the thing about historical fiction, it's got to feel true in two ways. It's got to be the psychic truth, in other words, the feelings and what's in your imagination, in your mind of your protagonists. But it's also got to feel true in this documentary way. If you've got something wrong, like he looked up something on his calculator,

you know, it just becomes grotesque and silly, unless, of course, you're playing funny games. You are a truth teller, as you say, in your work. You spoke on Desert Island Discs about how you can never fib about a feeling because you'll get caught out and your poem won't sound right and it won't feel right. Can you lie? In your personal life, do you have an addiction to truth telling? I'm probably no better or worse than anybody else, to be honest. I mean, I sometimes think writing is a bit like a ventriloquist. You are the ventriloquist, but what you write is the dummy or the character that

you're making talk. So as with ventriloquism, you can make the dummy say whatever he wants. So quite often, obviously, they're rude, or they're funny, or they're more stupid than you are, or more clever than you are, or whatever. And ventriloquists play with that. And part of the fun of being a ventriloquist, I can see, is that you can work through various personality aspects of yourself that you may not always want to admit in real life. Well, that's the fun of writing. So in real life, I don't suppose I'm any better or worse than anybody else about it. I mean, I try to be honest, but I can't actually put hand on heart and say I'm somehow or other

more honest than other people. But the thing about the page and writing is that you know that if there's a falsity, other people will spot it and they won't enjoy what you're writing. I mean, part of the enjoyment, again, this cropped up in the interview I did with Hilary Mantel, is a sense of being there. So it's, if you like that phrase, being there, if you put that with sort of quotes around it, that's what writers try to do. They say what the smell of something is, or what the look of it is, or the tone of voice or the expression that crosses someone's face. And that takes you, the reader, to there. So it's the

writer's job to get you to be there. So it's a slightly clumsy phrase on my part. I'm sure this is a sort of clever noun I could use, but the being there is what writers strive for, and that's got to be a kind of truth. And both words are important in that phrase, the being and the there. I think it was a very eloquent way of putting it, actually. So thank you for that. I'll get onto your failures in a second, but I'm aware that it is two years almost to the day that you got COVID and went through that horrendous experience that I touched on in the introduction. How are you? I'm pretty good. I mean, as a measure of it, I can tell you that I'm sitting at the moment in my office, which is in a place called Wood Green in North London.

But I live in a place about, I could tell you because I've looked it up on Google, 1.7 miles from my home. And nearly every day, I walk at least to the office 1.7 miles, And nearly every day I walk at least to the office, 1.7 miles, and quite often back. And I try to do it as fast as I can. It tends to take me about 30 minutes one way and then a little bit more the other way because it's uphill. The clue's in the name, Muswell Hill. So that gives you a measure of what I'm capable of at 76. As I say, I try to do that.

A nurse told me at the brain hospital, they said, you know, five times 30 is a great exercise routine. So that's what I aim for. Five times 30 a week. So that's good. My left eye, if you could see me, I could tell you that my left eye, I can't really see you if we were talking visually, as it were. And my left ear is pretty redundant too.

It's pretty well conked out. And that's because I had multiple microbleeds in my brain caused by COVID. People don't quite realize it's what's called a vascular illness as well as a respiratory one. So when the virus gets into the bloodstream, it tends to knock out the cells that stop you clotting. Once they're knocked out, then you get blood clots. And I had blood clots in my pulmonary artery, whopping great big ones in my pulmonary artery. And then because it sort of bursts the capillaries, my toes, they didn't drop off though some COVID victims, casualties, what do we call them? COVID patients, they did lose their toes rather in the same way

as you get frostbite. I've got numb toes. That's my little treat. And I lost my toenails, exchanged them for rather interesting scabs. And I got these microbleeds in my brain, which probably caused me a huge amount of fuzziness and confusion. But the permanent damage is to my left eye and left ear. I don't really have those anymore. Well, I do. That's a silly thing to say.

I have them, but they're kind of patchy. What was it like being in a coma? Well, the easy way to answer is that, how would I know? The interesting thing about a coma is that somebody said to me, are you okay if we put you to sleep? And I said, will I wake up? And he said, you've got a 50-50 chance. And I said, if I don't sign the bit of paper, he said, zero chance of waking up. So I signed the piece of paper. At the time, I thought 50-50, wow, that's pretty good, isn't it? Maybe my maths is not very good, but at the time I thought, well, that's not bad, heads or tails. And that's it. Bang, I was gone. And then the next stuff I remember is I think I was complaining about some mittens that I had on my hands because they were worried I'd pull out the tubes.

So I had sort of mittens and I was complaining about them. And I can remember a nurse saying in a rather strange kind of Tai Chi like voice, relax, save your energy. like voice, relax, save your energy. And I said, the bed's too short. And she'd say, relax, save your energy. So that's about the first memory I have. And if I can sort of calibrate it with what my wife tells me, that would have been roundabout sort of 43, 44 days. So I was in a proper coma for about 40 days. And when I say in a coma, you get a cocktail of drugs. One set is to knock you out completely, but the other is to paralyze you. People don't quite realize that, that if you're being ventilated, that's to say you've got a tube violently stuck down your throat, which they pump air into your lungs. If all that you were was unconscious, then you would try to vomit the tube up, or even worse, you'd be like attacking it with

your hands and everything, because you'd be choking and so on. So they have to paralyze you as well. So it takes some effort to get you out of that. And the longer you're in, the less likely you are to come out. So from about, I think I was getting this from a nurse the other day talking to her, I think from about 20 days onwards, then you've probably got a 50-50 chance of coming out. So there was quite a struggle to get me to wake up. And they were very worried about this kind of blown eye. They could look at me and there was this strange dilated eyeball kind of staring at them. Professor Hugh Montgomery, the consultant, the way he put it was, well, we didn't know whether you were going to be brain dead or not, Michael.

You know, the way consultants talk in this lovely blunt way. And I went, what? Brain dead? Is that what you thought I was going to be? He said, yep. So it was touch and go. And what enabled me to wake up more than anything else was the fact that they broke the COVID restrictions by wheeling me out with all the tubes in me to the fourth floor atrium of the Whittington Hospital. And Emma came in all masked up. Emma's your wife. Yes, that's it. And she held my hand and played recordings off the phone of our children and my old ones. And I reacted. I waved my arms about and she said that I held her hand very hard. And when they wheeled me back into the lift to go back to the intensive care ward, apparently, and this is really going to surprise you, I didn't stop talking. Apparently, and this is really going to surprise you, I didn't stop talking. So I know that's a huge surprise to you.

She was described by Hugh Montgomery as the game changer. So that's what I call her now. She gets quite irritated by it. But I say, Emma, you were the game changer. And I get a bit weepy. And she says, oh, stop it. She won't take me being sentimental like that. We're so grateful that you're still talking. We're so grateful for Emma changing the

game. Thank you for telling us that. What a beautiful, beautiful image. It's quite a step change now because we're coming on to your first failure from the very profound to the seemingly less so, which is a cricket failure. Tell us what happened, Michael. So I loved cricket as an older child, in other words, sort of eight, nine, 10, 11, and then a young teenager, loved watching cricket, loved playing it. I wasn't very good at it, but I loved it. And I was mad keen to sort of specialise in various things, one of which was fielding close into the bat in a position called silly mid-on, which some people call very silly mid-on, which some people call very silly

mid-on, as exemplified by the story that I'm about to tell you. So I'm standing or doing that sort of strange squatty thing that cricketers do with their bums in the air. I'm standing there thinking, you know, if this ball comes to me, I'm going to catch it. So over comes the ball, the batsman whacks it, and he whacks it straight at me. Now, very good Sillimid on-fielders then move their hands up into the air and catch the ball. In my case, it hit my nose, and I fell to the ground straight away. And the cricket teacher, who was also, as it happens, the woodwork teacher, came running over and said, did you catch it, Michael? He probably called me Rosen at the time because it was that kind of

school. Did you catch it, Rosen? And I was probably only semi-conscious anyway. So I said, no, I didn't. Anyway, the result of that was my nose was severely bent. So my parents said, maybe we ought to take you to the hospital. So I think I went after a day or two to the hospital and they told me that when the swelling went down, they would take me in for a day and I would go under for a full anesthetic. And he then showed me a rubber hammer and said, we will bang your nose back into shape, which I always thought at the time was really very funny. So I was about 13. So I failed to catch the ball. Mr. Carol, the woodwork master was very disappointed, but there was one success came out of it, which was the consultant bashed my nose straight. Thank you. So in a way your nose did actually catch the ball. It's just that you couldn't clasp it because

your nose didn't have the appropriate digits. So that's not really a failure either. But did it put you off cricket? No. I mean, I did go on trying to play cricket. It's just I wasn't very good at it. So I did give up. But I did that sort of vicarious thing that people do when they're not very good at cricket, which is watch it a lot. And there was a short period when I did let it out to a friend of mine, a teacher that I did like cricket and sort of had once played it. And he said, that's fantastic because I'm in a team called the Hackney Martians because they play on Hackney marshes. Yeah, you get the joke. Anyway, he said, would you like to play? And I went, yeah, kind yeah kind of anyway so I did play and rather weirdly I batted and managed to get another bloke out because I ran and he wasn't running and anyway

he got out or he ran and I didn't anyway which he wasn't very pleased about but I did bowl and over and actually the batsman was caught so I did actually get for sort of one for naught so it was a massive success. And then from then on, my good friend Alan said, you know, will you come and play for the Hackney Martians again? And I thought, probably not. So I didn't. Interesting. So did you almost want to quit while you were ahead? Because some people, and I'm not one of them, like some people can enjoy sport when they're mediocre at it and they take joy in that. I can't, so therefore I just don't play any sport. But do you think you're someone who needs to be good at something to get

a full level of enjoyment? I think the difference is between a team game and a solo sport. Oh, totally agree. So if it's a team game, then my fear was that I would, you know, let more people down other than that bloke that I let down in that one game that I played that I would go on, you know, I'd drop catches, you know, I'd bowl and, you know, be tense over that they'd put me on for, and, you know, they'd score a hundred runs from one over and we'd lose the game. So I was that fear, but I do like solo stuff. So I did spend quite a lot of time in my 30s running. And I was no good at it, but I absolutely adored it.

So that's fine. And I wasn't that bothered as to whether I was any good at it. And in a way, the walking that I do now, I see that as sport. I know it isn't. But if you saw me with my kind of very serious face, wearing my sunglasses this morning and slightly frowny and moving my arms and very purposefully. And then every now and then lifting them in order to improve my core, you would see here is somebody who's taking his sport very interesting. You might call it exercise

or maybe not just call it walking. And you'll see, I do take it seriously. And I don't mind that measured up against, I don't know, a million other 76 year olds. I might be at a millionth. But anyway, that's fine. Is part of the reason you don't like failing at team sport because you don't like letting people down? Yes, I think you've discovered something there. Yes. Now that you've put it that way. Yeah, I can't bear it. Yes, it's a great fear and connects with something rather terrible, which is the loss of my son. So my son, Eddie, died of meningitis. And I suppose not a day

goes by when I sort of feel that I've let the family down because he was staying with me. It was just me and him in the house. And I didn't spot that he had meningitis and he just seemed to be a bit fluey and I didn't spot that it was meningitis so there isn't a day that goes by when I do feel that I let him down and I let the family down so that hurts yes. Michael I'm so sorry for that unassailable tragedy. And I read about Eddie during the course of researching this interview, and I wasn't sure whether to talk to you about him because I don't know what kind of pain that must be to carry. And I'm so grateful to you for sharing that. Do you like talking about him? What does it feel like for you to talk about your son in this way?

These days, it's absolutely fine and something of a relief because talking releases something. This is why we have psychotherapists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and so on is because there's a sense in which when thoughts are in your head, there is a way in which they're trapped. Not all of them, but some of them, they are trapped or they feel trapped. And then when you talk,

you let them out, you release them. And we've got all sorts of phrases, talk it through, talk it out. We've got all sorts of phrases that mean that. And so with Eddie, at the beginning, I couldn't talk about it. I was genuinely suffering. But now I have all sorts of memories and things and the whole family talk about him. His girlfriend, she was then, we write each other letters and talk about it. And the other day I found my dad's poem that he wrote for the funeral that the Jamaican poet James Berry read at the funeral. And that was just amazing because I hadn't been able to find it. All I could remember was one line from it. And I was feeling frustrated and kind of a bit, well, a sort of sense of deprivation

that I couldn't find the poem because it had been so good in fact if just hang on one second I could reach across oh we'd love it's on the shelf just hang on okay there may be a little right yes I've managed to get it so it's in an envelope in which my father it's got my father's address on it, and he's written on it Harold's poem. So here we are, and it's in his handwriting and typed. So here is what he wrote. Grandson Eddie, larger than life, filling the frame of the doorway in his hockey goalkeeper's gear, a giant from outer space, larger than life. Eddie in his arsenal shirt, acres of it across his chest, stroking it with his great hands. Eddie with his first watch in the Natural History Museum, checking the time every minute in charge of the rendezvous by the dinosaur, making sure there was still some time left. Nowhere near enough time,

we now know, larger than life, but not large enough. Oh my goodness. That's such a beautiful poem and it gives such a sense of him. Absolutely. And I sent it to Eddie's girlfriend the other day because she wouldn't have known it or had it had I don't think she had a copy of it anyway I say Eddie's girlfriend I mean she's gone on to lead a life obviously because this was a long time ago and she wrote back straight away saying that the image of Eddie was exactly as she remembered him. Yeah. Great poem. Do you believe in an afterlife of any sort? No, we are the afterlife. And I take great comfort from that. That's to say, the afterlife is the memories and the physical remnants of the person who's gone,

whatever remnants they are. I don't mean that in bits of their body as such, though, of course, atomically speaking, they are there without being mystical about it. The body and what remains of it remains atomically around. The atoms and molecules are there. But the remnants in our minds of everybody who knew Eddie, and then also physically, you know, I've got his shoes. They're just on the other side of the room here, believe it or not, in a box. And I get them out every now and then. I've got all sorts of things. There's a little photograph of him playing with his stepsister just up there on the bookcase.

I've got some Duplo people sitting on the shelf there. And one of them, I seem to remember, me and Eddie decided was Aretha Franklin. So it does actually look a little bit like Aretha Franklin, the hair, definitely. And I seem to remember we'd sit there going, you make me feel like a natural woman. It was a very funny bloke, I should say. There's also a Jewish thing. There's what's called a yortzeit candle, which technically I should have lit every year, but I haven't. Yortzeit means year time, literally in Yiddish. You would say that's there. So there's all sorts of remnants and then all sorts of events as well.

So, for example, the guys I used to play hockey with, they have a hockey match every year in memory of Big Eddie. And they even try and encourage me to get on and hit the ball. I always miss. So there's all sorts of ways in which the afterlife is here and now. Thank you, Michael. What a profound and helpful sentiment. Peyton, it's happening.

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Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago set in motion a chain of gruesome events and sparked cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis.

Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. medieval from history hits. Let's move on to your second failure, which is at university, and it involves an oral exam called Aviva. Tell us what happened. So I seem to remember there were 10 papers that we had to sit for our finals. And I just thought I'd probably sort of scraped through or with a bit of luck got a second. It's at university, Oxford, you had a first, a second and a third, not a two, one or two, two. So I thought, well, with a bit of luck, I've got a second. And then I got noticed that I had a viva, as it's called a viva voce, living voice. So I had a viva, as it's called, a viva voce, living voice.

So I had a viva, as we used to call them. And you only had a viva if you were borderline between two and a one, a three and a two, or a failure and a three. So I sat there thinking, oh, what's this for? And then my tutor told me that it's, in fact, for a first. And I thought, what? What, really? I mean, I won't let on the kind of details of how I revised and so on.

But anyway, there you go. And so I went in there and sitting in front of me are something like 10 people in gowns. Imagine that I'm in my little shorty gown, which is what we used to have to wear, carrying my silly little mortarboard, my little white bow tie. They're sitting in front of me and the chair of these examiners is wearing also a crimson tabard. And she was the very famous lady, later to be Dame Helen Gardner. In fact, I think she was already a dame, very grand woman. And off they went. And you had to have an alpha on each paper to get a first. Well, they told me that I had alphas on all the papers, bar one. That's to say the one marked by Dame Helen Gardner, who was also the chair of examiners, who I had crossed swords with at least twice. Once because we'd had a faculty meeting called by the faculty because we were objecting to the nature of the course.

And then a second time when, because we had to sit the exams in a form of uniform, that was called another Latin phrase, subfusque. I'll leave it to your imagination, what we called the FUSC word. And so instead of wearing it, which is what we should have done, which was a suit, it, which is what we should have done, which was a suit, black shiny shoes, the gown, the mortarboard and a white bow tie. I'd got on a black corduroy jean suit and tied a bandage around my neck. And she stood by me as I was doing the exam and wrote on a little piece of paper, gentlemen must wear sub-fusk. And then she outlined what it was.

So that was twice I'd crossed swords with her. And now here was my third time. And she then proceeded to go through the three questions that I'd written. And the first one, she said, I had to put a line through. And it was on Elizabethan comedy. And you chose, Mr. Rosen, to choose plays that are very obscure. So what I'd chosen to do was because I'd read the fact that in Midsummer Night's Dream, you may remember, the rude mechanicals put on a play called Pyramus and Thisbe. And hardly anyone has ever asked, what was this play? Who was putting on plays like Pyramus and Thisbe in Elizabethan times? And the answer was that people like that,

Shakespeare's taking the mickey out of something that really happened. People, very ordinary people, guilds, as they were called, guild workers, would put on plays, which we would now call romances. In other words, they were adventures of one sort or another, Pyramus and Thisbe, which is like a Romeo and Juliet story. Well, I found a book that said what these other plays were called. One of them was called Mucodorus. So I went off to the Bodleian Library, read them and thought, well, when I do my question on Elizabethan comedy, I'll write about these things as an original piece of research, you see. Dear Dame Helen Gardner, I found it afterwards, had never heard of these plays, went across to the Bodleian because she thought that it was a spoof that I'd made them up.

And so she then found that they weren't, came back to the exam she was marking and put a line through it and gave it zero marks. She then went on to the other two questions, one of which was about Elizabethan ballads. And I had argued with the fact that instead of going to written sources, you should go to oral sources. You can't do it, obviously, for Elizabethans, but you can trace them back. And so I wrote an essay based on Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp's collection of the ballad. She put another line through that saying that was obtuse. And then she moved on to a question on the metaphysical poets. And she said, you've written, Mr. Rosen, you've written complete nonsense about the metaphysical poets, and you've left out John

Dunn. Mr. Rosen, do you know what a paradox is? And I said, well, it would be a paradox if I got a first after this. And she said, no, Mr. Rosen, that would be an irony, not a paradox. And so she said, that's it. And I walked out. And I remember as I walked out, the bloke on the end was the guy who'd marked my Chaucer paper. And he was a very little timid guy. And he leant across as I was going out and whispered, that was one of the best papers that I've ever marked. And I left. Anyway, needless to say, I didn't get a first. I failed. Anyway, needless to say, I didn't get a first. I failed. And in fact, after I went out, there was a huge row between the other examiners and Dame Helen Gardner and said that she had behaved appallingly.

And she refused to, as it were, do anything about it. It was the paper she had marked and she wasn't getting its second mark. All she would do was apparently she wrote to my tutor saying she thanked me for my demeanour. So there's a little note somewhere in the archives of Wadham College Oxford thanking Michael Rosen for his demeanour, whatever that means. Anyway, so that's what happened. Have you forgiven her? Oh, no, no. I love it. No, I haven't. I'm still bearing a grudge. Real, yes, I do. Real grudge. Yeah, I'm really annoyed about it. No, I haven't. I'm still bearing a grudge. Yes, I do. Real grudge. Yeah. I'm really annoyed about it. I love that you can remember it all so vividly. I mean, that's exactly the same as me. If someone slights me, I never forget. I just never forget a single detail. But can I ask you something about the content of that story as vivid as it is? Because you're talking about vivas and sub-fusk and having to wear certain

clothes and mortarboards and all of that. And you went to an elite institution. How do you feel about those elite educational institutions now? Do you think that they do more good than harm in terms of education? Or can things like that kind of language put a lot of people off who don't get access and don't have the opportunities to go to an Oxbridge College? There are several answers to that. Did it do a lot of good for me? Yes, absolutely. I benefited from the enormous amount of theatre, journalism and wonderful tutors who really taught me a lot to do with English literature. And I enjoyed writing about it. I enjoyed writing plays while I was there and acting in them and writing poems and so on and getting them published and writing

articles. So fantastic. I think I got a huge amount from it. So that's the first thing. Then is it off-putting? Well, it's off-putting for some people who go to Oxford or Cambridge because they find it overwhelming. And so quite often, people from state schools, it is more often than not, who've done incredibly well to get in and then get overwhelmed by the pressure and what they perceive sometimes as the snobbery or the fact that there are these codes that they can never quite figure or the fact that these public school people have already figured it before they get there. I can think of people, I won't name names, who've been really disturbed by it. And then as for it being off-putting for other people,

oh, absolutely. I'm sure there'll be people listening to this who just think that they're really irritated, even by the fact that I'm taking the mickey out of it, viva and sub-fusc and say, oh, give over, Rosen, you know, why aren't you sort of condemning it? And I'll only say this, the quality of the education on offer, I'll just say it should be available for everybody. The kind of facilities that were available to us and so on, in an ideal world, all universities would be like that. And all universities would be very open places, maybe 50, 60% of the population could get into universities or 100%. So my view is that it's, of course, an elite privileged institution. I don't think it does society any good that we have those. It's not that the education is no good, but just that I think

it should be available to everybody. And have you ever crossed paths or did you ever cross paths with Dame Helen Gardner again? No, she went on being very famous. She was the world expert on metaphysical poetry. No, I never met her and then she passed away. Do you feel that your career since Oxford has somewhat proved her wrong? No, no, no. I mean, I just amused by the fact that she couldn't cope with the fact that I did a piece of original research, and then wrote about it in an exam off the top of my head, you didn't have open books. So it was all remembered. And I'd learned some quotes from these plays. No one has ever written about these plays, by the way.

I've looked and looked, apart from this one reference and one or two things. So I was doing what is the equivalent of a short sort of thesis, an MA, even a PhD, because you could do a PhD on these plays. And in fact, I should say, I have tried, it's come to a standstill, writing a piece

of historical fiction of a boy who runs away and joins one of these players who put on these plays. So there is a sort of roundup. But no, I don't think I've proved her wrong, other than that I've tried to do some original research since. So I wrote a book about Emile Zola. No one had ever written a book about Emile Zola's stay in England. So I did some original research, translated the letters that he wrote to his children, never been translated into English. So I remember thinking while I was doing that, I'm sort of doing the thing that university gave me the tools to do. And I've done that with various things, with radio programs that we've done, things where

I've researched stuff. So, for example, it's now known where Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote some of his most famous poems, like I Caught This Morning, Morning's Minion, Kingdom of Daylight, Dauphin, Dapple, Dawn Drawn, Falkland, anyway, that one, The Windhopper. And he wrote it in a sort of monastery called St. Bynos in Wales. And I thought, well, why don't we go there and find out what room he was in and then sort of recreate Gerard Manley Hopkins writing, I caught this morning, morning's minion. Well, no one had ever done that before. So that sort of thing, university gave me that. Dame Helen Gardner didn't give it to me,

but I suppose what she did give me was the idea that people can treat that sort of thing with contempt if they're not interested in following it up, if you like. And so it gives me a spur to do original research on things. And that's how I found out about what happened to the people who were killed in my family in the Holocaust, that I went on and on and on finding documents, ringing up archives in France, the Polish ones a bit harder, but the French ones, and that's how I found out. And that was 20 to 30 years of original research around what happened to my father's French uncles. Extraordinary. Thank you so much for sharing that. And that

obsessive, may I say, slightly energised nature, that inquisitive curiosity that you have about the world and wanting to get to the bottom of something, wanting to find the very origins. It is such a unique characteristic. But one place where you failed to operate that, I understand, is in a diagnosis of a medical condition. And that's your final failure. Tell us what happened there. So there are some illnesses that have many symptoms and the clever thing that doctors do is connect them up. If somebody turns up in a surgery and says, my arm aches a bit and I've got a funny itchy scalp and a clever doctor will go, oh my goodness, that's something or other. And they all link it up.

That's what brilliant doctors do. But of course, we also try to do it ourselves. And we don't have the knowledge to do it. So now we've got to think of an illness that lasts for about 12, 13 years. And I'll tell you some of the symptoms that I didn't link up over this period. So imagine me looking at my hands and seeing them going a bit puffy. Imagine me looking in the mirror or noticing that my eyes water. Imagine that I sort of feel much colder than anybody else. I get some moaning about being cold. I look at my lips and I think,

oh, they look a bit swollen. I look at my hair on my head and think, oh, that's funny because it used to be a bit sort of curly and now it seems to have gone a bit more like a sort of wire brush. That's quite funny. And even slightly changed colour. That's very strange. Now, all these don't all happen at the same time. They're spread over several years. And then I noticed that it's funny as I walk, if I walk up a hill, I can sort of feel my thighs kind of freezing as if somehow or other they've got locked. Oh, yeah, that happens when I beat an egg. So you see these symptoms, they're all separate.

They don't seem to have anything at all to do with each other. Somebody says, when you talk, you slur. As you talk, you sort of, if you want to say a word like slur, you end up saying slur or Scotland. There was a radio producer saying, Michael, you're talking very, very slowly. Could you speed up a bit? And I think, am I? Am I? Except I would have said, am I? Because I was talking slowly and my voice sounded deeper when I heard them back. All those symptoms. Finally, I go to the doctor and complain about my eyes.

He says, yes, it's conjunctivitis. Handed me some yellow squeezy stuff. I did that for a couple of weeks, made no difference, went back. And then he said, I tell you what, let's do a blood test. Good old doctors. Either we in a bottle or have a blood test. So he said a blood test, came back and he said, ah, kidney function's looking not very good. I'm going to send you to renal at Barts.

So off I went to Barts Hospital facing Mr. Baker. Mr. Baker sat opposite me and he had a pile of notes and he started talking to me. But rather strangely, instead of talking about my kidneys and weeing and that sort of thing, which is usually what kidney people talk about, he said, what have you been doing this week? And I said, I'll do the way i used to talk now i've been out with some children i'm doing some poetry workshops now you think i'm joking i could play your recording and that is not an exaggeration okay so he said really and how did that go i said it was very interesting and then i carried on for a bit more. And he said, you know, this stuff about your kidneys, it's a load of old rubbish. He pushed it to one side and said, you are hypothyroid.

And this moment for me is actually cataclysmic because at that moment, all the decisions, all the feelings that I'd had over the previous 12 years, all the things I'd done where I'd said, I can't do that because I'm too slow, or I can't go walking there because it's too cold. All the many decisions I'd made about relationships, which I won't go into, it all flashed before me because I knew immediately what he meant there because of my year of doing medicine. And two photographs came up in front of my mind of a woman with a round, white, quite pudgy face. And then a woman next to her, which was her with a lean, thin sort of Vera Lynn like face. And it was the same woman. And the first one was in a state of hypothyroidism.

And the other one after treatment with what the thyroid gland produces, which is called thyroxine. So sorry, for people who don't know, before you went to Oxford, you had a year at medical school. So was it a photo from a sort of medical textbook? Yeah, it's actually two years, a year at medical school and the first year at Oxford doing anatomy, physiology and biochemistry. So I had done a bit of it. So it's from this textbook that I had in my house. I've still got it over there. Sammy writes, as it's called by medical students. I had in my house. I've still got it over there. Sammy writes, as it's called by medical students. And these two photographs were just, as he said, your hypothyroid, I went, oh no, I could have,

I'm sorry, do that again. Oh no. I could have diagnosed that myself because I know what hypothyroidism is. And then he said, this is fantastic. I'm going to get the students in and he brought the students in and he said what's he got i'm going to leave the room and you're going to find out so he left the room and of course first student comes over to me going what you got and i said i'm not allowed to say you see so then he came in two minutes later and they said what's he got and the first guy said it's kidney failure sir and he went bananas he went what just because got? And the first guy said, it's kidney failure, sir. And he went bananas. He went, what? Just because we're in the renal department, it doesn't mean that he's got kidney failure. Have you felt his pulse?

Have you felt his skin? Have you got him to walk across the room? Mr. Rosen, will you walk across the room, putting one foot in front of the other, touching your toe to your heel? I couldn't do it. Gosh. I couldn't do it. I was only, what, 35?

And he said, look, he can't even do that. Now, now watch this did any of you test his reflexes watch this put the leg over the other leg got hammer whack no response at all leg no reflex at all so he said look at that the leg doesn't even move look at it no reflex what's he got kidney failure sir no because it's not kidney failure he's hypothyroid and they went oh so they all got a really good interesting lesson but just because you're in the renal department it don't mean that the guy sitting in front of you has got kidney failure so he told them what you do which is basically take the pulse feel the skin test the reflexes get someone to walk across the room, get them to talk, and then you find out. So that was the great Mr. Baker. So then I went for a blood test,

came back a week later and met by a doctor who was called Dr. Gesundheit. What? Really? Nobody believes me. You can look him up. He's at Stanford University now. Dr. Gesundheit, what a name for a doctor, eh? He was American. And he said, I have your test here. I have your results here. And he said, oh my God, technically you're dead. And I said, sorry. He said, you have no thyroid function and the antibodies that destroyed your thyroid through Hashimoto syndrome, they've gone as well. You should be at least in a torpor.

And I've never forgotten that because I said, a torpor. He said, you have to come in right now, Mr. Rosen. I said, oh, right. And so I went off to the metabolic unit now. And I went off to the metabolic unit where I was surrounded with people with endocrine problems of one sort or another. And then they started giving me this magic powder, which is basically a substitute thyroxine. And well, by three months, I was kind of back to what I would have been, except I was 12 years older. And so my brain was now completely frazzled,

because I didn't know who I was. Was I the person I was 12 years ago? No, for two reasons. One, I was older, but the other, because I've been through this experience of being hypothyroid right up to a point where I nearly died. had a huge struggle for at least the next two, three, four years trying to figure out who I was and where I was. I kept it quiet to myself rather stupidly, but it was a big struggle. You didn't talk to a therapist or anyone like that about it. You just got through it yourself. Yeah. And in fact, in a way, it was remiss of Barts not to have seen that this is somebody who needed that because they just thought, well, we got the magic powder. We can now to deal with hypothyroidism. It's the other stuff that's difficult. Hyperthyroidism is much harder to deal with, or some of these other endocrine things, the one that affects the adrenal cortex and one affects the pituitary. That's the real difficult one. But thyroid, they go, yes, great. Thyroid, we know how to deal with that one. Take some pills.

For most of us, it works. Some people, it doesn't, for complicated reasons to do with the fact that thyroid doesn't only produce one hormone, it produces several. So they kind of chalk that up. Success, that's all right. What's the problem? And they forget that your body is attached to your mind. This is one of those things that perplexes medicine quite a lot.

Is the mind connected to the body? Is the body connected to the body? Is the body connected to the mind? Most of us as human beings think that they are connected, but doctors on occasions don't realise that. Well, it's a very, very interesting point, actually. And I suppose it leads me to my final question, which is, you are such a wonderful storyteller. You've told us so many stories today of your life, and you've been through a lot. And you have told stories about every stage of your life, including the hyperthyroidism. A book came out of that. But all of these phases and all of these failures and all of these things that you've endured, do you think that you, Michael Rosen,

all of these things that you've endured. Do you think that you, Michael Rosen, that there is something fundamentally you-ish that has never changed? Do you still feel like that young boy in Pinner? Fundamentally you-ish or fundamentally Jewish? That's the interesting question. Yeah. There's a title for a new memoir. Well, should I say, most of the stories I've told will be in a new book called Getting Better, which is, in fact, it tells the story about trying to get over or cope with Eddie, how to deal with my hypothermia. I think there's even the Dame Helen Gardner story. And it is about dealing with failure, difficulty, challenges. And that is the next book coming out in January. So I've slightly preempted this. I'm sure my publishers will be furious.

It's almost as if I planned it, haven't planned it at all. Exactly. There we are. You see that trial and error without fear of failure, Elizabeth. Yes. That's it. You see, you're not worried about failing. You just went piling in there. So am I still that boy then? Yes, of course. I mean, it's very hard to find the image, isn't it? I seem to remember at the end of Peer Gynt or towards the end, he sort of peels back an onion and he's hoping to find the secret of life there. And then he actually finds nothing. But it's a sort of double joke by Ibsen. I think that in a sense, the meaning of life is in the layers and there's no use trying to find something

at the end of the rainbow or in the middle of the onion because it's there in the layers so that's one nice image I sometimes think that I quite enjoy cutting onions and making tomato cucumber onion and greek parsley salad so I quite often think about onions and there's a way in which these layers so the outer layer is what we see of an onion, but the innermost bit of the onion is still there, even though all we see is the outside. So that's one image that I kind of work with. There's another image that Freud mucks around with, though he ends up rejecting it, which is if we could imagine a city in which nothing ever got destroyed. So that every building that gets put on top of another building, on top of another building, on top of another building, and they're all there. He then goes on to reject that image, but I quite like it even so. And just recently in the city of London, they found this mosaic.

I think it's the biggest Roman mosaic ever found in England, I think. And I just think, oh, wow, that is just so like us, that hiding away is a mosaic. So if you say to me, me and my brother mucking about in the bedroom, then I'm there with that mosaic in like a split second. And it's so alive. And I belong to a Facebook group about the place that I was brought up in, Pinner. And people put up stuff and we'd say things. And when I see it, there are times when it feels like it's actually, I'm in the room with that person and I can see their gestures. You know, a boy in my class, girl in my class from when I'm eight or seven.

Someone put up a picture the other day of a group of kids and sitting on the front row is Reg Dwight, who you may know is Elton John, because Elton John was brought up in Pinner. I didn't know him, but I can see the picture, the group of people, and there's one or two of them who I recognize. And it's so kind of there, you know, in the hall that they're in and the smell. And so it sort of feels a bit like that Freud image that the stuff never goes away. The mosaic is there. So yes, I'm Jewish and Jewish. You are a mosaic of all of your experiences. And we are so grateful for your Jewishness and your Jewishness because they are interlinked in an integral way. Michael Rosen, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming on this podcast but beyond that for writing such wonderful wonderful stories that have entertained me and countless others you are a national treasure I'm giving it to you you can put your tongue in your cheek but thank you so much for coming on How To Fail. Thanks very much for having me Elizabeth been great. having me, Elizabeth. It's been great. If you enjoyed this episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I would so appreciate it if you could rate, review and subscribe. Apparently, it helps other people know that we exist.