The way I figure it, the one terrorist in England with a sense of humor, a man known as Khalid the Droll, had said to the cell, 'I bet I can get them all to take off their shoes in airports.' So this prankster set up poor impressionable Reid and won his bet.
As if to clinch the point, Reid directs me to the key metaphor in the book's first sequence, The Flowers of Crete, in which the seemingly unvanquishable Cretan minotaur is a metaphor for Lucinda's indestructible sarcoma.
Reid tells me he has been pleased to see the snowdrops and hellebores that she planted have survived the recent snow.
The book's last sequence, Lucinda's Way, is the sweetest – a fond remembrance of a lovely sounding marriage, one in which she never threw away a scrap of his writing "without kissing it first", and in which Reid, as he puts it, was "second always to you, the dashing heroine".
Her posthumous fate, suggests Reid (who has no religious faith), seemed preferable to heaven or hell: My wife is in there, somewhere, doing practical work: her organs and tissues are educating young doctors or helping researchers outwit the disease that outwitted her.
Thus, Reid is only the fourth poet to win the overall Costa (or Whitbread as it was known under its earlier sponsor) and of those four, three have been honoured for elegies.
"If we don't, it's going to be very difficult to get the bill out of committee," warned Reid.
"Kenny should keep his opinions to himself," said Reid. "He should comment on his own team, not other teams.
It is also thought Mr Reid might have had little choice but to opt for some sort of suspension, as Mr Trimble could have pulled his three Ulster Unionist ministers out of government, and the DUP would then have followed, meaning an election could not have worked as unionists must be involved in the cross-party government system set up by the Good Friday accord.
After Hughes's death his widow, Carol, asked Reid to edit the letters.
Raine is a long-time friend and literary associate of Reid, going back long before they both emerged on the literary scene in the late 70s, spearheading the "Martian" poetry movement by which the familiar world was seen afresh through striking metaphors and images.
