What Gove got right: learn a poem by heart and make a friend for life

Telegraph

25-05-2025

The Formula One driver Jochen Mass pursued a career of extreme jeopardy. But the detail that caught my eye in his Telegraph obituary was his ability to quote poetry from memory: 'a trick he had acquired to sharpen the mind before races'.
To learn a poem by heart is, as Michael Gove put it when he was education secretary, 'To own a great work of art forever'. The young Patrick Leigh Fermor, walking across Europe, recited poetry aloud. His prodigious memory famously enabled him to cap the lines from Horace with which the German general, Heinrich Kreipe, greeted his wartime kidnapping by Leigh Fermor and the Cretan resistance. But on the whole, poetry is easiest to commit to memory when it has a good thumping metre and rhyme scheme.
The poems I know by heart are the ones I relished as a child and later read to my son. Repetition meant that we memorised effortlessly the fates of small children described with grim relish in Hilaire Belloc's poetry collection Cautionary Tales for Children ('For every time she shouted 'Fire!'/They only answered, 'Little Liar!' '), and the well deserved end of Robert Southey's poem Sir Ralph the Rover: ('Sir Ralph the Rover tore his hair/He curst himself in his despair').
The grim relish was, of course, a large part of the charm: but where sensitivity readers stalk, it is largely off the curriculum. A pity, for there's nothing like it to sharpen the mind (and even, perhaps, to strengthen the spirit against jeopardy).
Learning is too good to be reserved for the young
If adolescence is the original awkward age, it finds its mirror image in the turbulence of the middle years. Like love (but less welcome) middle age comes without warning. One moment you're congratulating yourself on having negotiated the hurdles of early adulthood without major incident. The next, along come intimations of mortality and a vague sense that you no longer know who you are.
'Faces look familiar, but they don't have names… Everything has changed,' sang Lucinda Williams. And so it has. From college reunions where you wonder, 'Who are all these ancient monuments?' before realising that they are your contemporaries, and they are wondering the same thing about you, to dinner parties where the talk is exclusively of acid reflux and dodgy tickers – everything has changed.
Then come the antidotes: more-or-less dramatic lifestyle changes, from fitness regimes and cosmetic interventions to short (or long) rides in fast machines and messy relationship break-ups. Less drastic are the hobbies of self-reinvention. Taking up a new pursuit: golf, gardening, or painting – offers a glimpse of a life that might have been, and occasionally a route into an entirely new career.
But last week, Radio 4's Today programme explored a different approach: the midlife return to a childhood hobby. The actor and comedian Alistair McGowan passed Grade 2 piano when he was nine, then gave up and didn't start again until he was 50. The ceramicist Emma Bridgewater was taught to crochet by her grandmother when she was eight, and recently re-learnt the craft with the help of a Ladybird book.
Both described the joy of rediscovering something begun in childhood. 'It's changed my life,' said McGowan. Bridgewater found that 'you cannot stress when you're involved in anything creative, and that's a superpower.' For her, crochet was also a way to reconnect with her beloved grandmother.
McGowan released an album of piano music in 2017, but they both insisted that going back to a childhood hobby wasn't intended as a side hustle. The de-stressing superpower only works, said Bridgewater, as long as money its not involved. McGowan emphasised the need to understand that you'll never reach the level you would have done if you'd put in the hours when you were young: the delight lies as much in learning how to learn as in the performance.
All this sounds like sage advice as I sidle back to the piano after decades of absence. As a teenager I developed a flash line in approximate sight-reading of pieces far too advanced for me. Now, with McGowan's advice about learning how to learn ringing in my ears, I've begun to explore the charm of scales. Sometimes, you really can go back and do things better.