When I learnt that he was a poet and a brilliant scholar, double-starred first in Latin and Greek from Cambridge, it served as a reminder that bigotry was not the sole dominion of the ignorant.
It was the poetry that drew me in – it was Owen, it was 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', it was when I learnt that he had died the week before Armistice Day and that his mother got the telegram on Armistice Day; there was something so pitiful about it.
It's been something of a sore point, so when I learnt that Babs House had been given a thorough facelift for its 10th birthday, and finally got the nod to pop down with some other ladies of the press to survey the results, I considered refusing to join the party this late in the day.
But I took a slightly different view next morning when I learnt that the previous day at a different checkpoint - in a very different part of the country - the army had stopped a bus and found a woman carrying 700 bomblets under her clothes.
'Please don't get mad at me over what I'm going to say: this morning, when you invited me to the concert, I was determined to go to make you happy and see you, but when I learnt that Diego invited the friends of that Marin, who I can't stand, to his box, I lost the desire to go.
Free to run in the fields near my mother's hut, free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village, free to roast mealies [corn] under the stars … It was only when I learnt that my boyhood freedom was an illusion … that I began to hunger for it".
