I can link big moments of my life to the great man. It’s just unfortunate that some of the memories make me wince
I had been looking forward to reading and listening to all the stuff marking Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday. Then I heard a trail for a radio play called Dinner With Dylan, going out on Saturday afternoon. The title jolted me back 40 years to a dark moment of shame and embarrassment in my otherwise pretty blameless school days. It was 1981, when I was 14, and long before I had a Dylan collection to rival anybody’s. In fact I can only have been dimly aware of the great man when I saw a BBC2 Playhouse drama called Bobby Wants to Meet Me. It was, as the name suggests, about someone building up to meeting Mr Dylan; I can’t remember if the meeting did or didn’t happen, I’m afraid. What I do know is that this play made a great impression on me. It must have done, because a few weeks or months after it went out, upon being set a creative-writing task, I wrote a fine piece of prose entitled Bobby Wants to Meet Me. I suppose a more competent cheat would have nicked the idea but covered their tracks by bothering to think up a different title. Not me.
The English teacher concerned was a Miss Curtis. I always got the impression she didn’t much like me, and this unhappy incident may well be the reason. She enjoyed my piece of writing very much indeed, she said, and gave me a very high mark for it. She may even have accorded me the honour of reading it out to my sullenly impressed classmates. I remember feeling very proud, notwithstanding my dirty little secret. As the weeks passed, worries that my plagiarising ways would be exposed ebbed away. Miss Curtis, unfortunately, had somehow come to smell a rat. Perhaps, I fondly imagined, she rated my piece so highly that she had mentioned it to a fellow member of staff for whom the title rang a bell. Or maybe, in lining the cat litter with pages from an old Radio Times, something caught her eye. Either way, I was soon to find out that the game was up.
