Up to last Christmas, under our roof, you needed something wrong with you to be reading The New Yorker. What changed last year was that my family gave me the gift that keeps on giving — an annual subscription. Previously, I depended on coming across it in my GP’s surgery — out-of-date copies usually, read once at home by one of the midwives or interns and brought in for the waiting-room magazine rack to edify the ailing.

Reading while waiting to be called made time precious, and there was always a tricolour run up the pole and saluted — mentally, at least — when the name of one of our own appeared towards the end of the list of contributors. The poem I read that day is there, written out in my own handwriting to feel what it felt like, in the commonplace book I was keeping irregularly then, between the French navigator Cassini’s ‘It is better to have absolutely no idea where you are, and to know it, than to believe confidently that you are where you are not’, and Paul Durcan’s ‘The Difficulty That Is Marriage’.

And it’s only now that it occurs to me as more than coincidence, not only that John Montague’s ‘Guardians’ should precede an eighteenth-century French navigator’s paraphrase of negative capability, but that the two poems, one preoccupied with disagreeing to disagree and the other touching on agreeing to differ, should appear on facing pages.

What I loved it for the first time I read it is what I love it for, reading it again — the stealthy progress through its five sentences and fourteen lines, the combination of ordinary idiom and Northern vernacular that lives comfortably beside the bigger, more literary ‘aloof’ and ‘hieratic’, the lightness of touch, the unshowy placement of ‘elixirs’ between ‘water-bottle’ and ‘fruit’, the timing — how the animals are in attendance within the first couple of lines while the father’s arrival is delayed until line nine, the way his arrival in the actual poem is as unobtrusive as his arrival into the imagined room, how no more is hinted at than is in the words themselves, the aptness of ‘ferrying’, how gradually the truth embedded in the lines yields itself up, the way — as it is with poems that hit the spot — it leaves you both surprised and delighted that such things constructed of words are possible.

Here was a writer who could do — and had done — anything, unafraid of doing the apparently simple thing that spoke directly and let you in. And now that I read it again it is ‘elixirs’ I am hung up on, not for the first time and not so much for the alchemical connotations but for how the word leads on to myrrh, and so transforms the cat and spaniel into scaled-down stable creatures, and the whole scene into a secular nativity.

In my commonplace book it is signed in my hand ‘John Montague (The New Yorker, October ’95)’. And what I can’t figure out now is how — failing total recall — I got it home and written out for rereading afterwards? In the absence of anything conclusive, the evidence points to my having left the physician’s premises for the chemist’s that day with more than a prescription for whatever it was that had been ailing me.