You Know The Type

You know the type:

You met them first, quite a while ago, now,

In some orange Penguin paperback.

You had fallen for the hype,

And really thought that critics ought to know

A good writer when they came across one.

You believed, had faith.

Or did you just prefer to show

You knew the fashionable names to drop?

Anyhow, you were taken in.

It was the age of innocence.

And, although you thought the characters tiresome,

You felt you ought to appreciate them,

Even emulate them, in their endless sophistication,

With their great minds, and Oxford education,

And their fashionable ways,

And their dinner parties, and their bed hopping.

Because they possessed the one, single qualification

Guaranteed to give them status:

They lived in London.

They were not rural,

They were not Northern

And somehow you forgot the one thing they were:

Pure fiction.