GD (Continued): Let’s suppose you’re black and, for whatever reason, you get into playing classical music, and then you end up marrying a white woman from the orchestra.  You live in a white neighborhood and play entirely white music—Beethoven and Bach and all this.  Still, you’re going to feel that you’re a black person. And in a way that is every bit as deep as that—even though I don’t work; I live in a nice neighborhood—my sense of who I am, my deepest core is working class.  This is the strange thing that happens: one only understands what one’s been through, retrospectively.  When I went to Oxford, it felt great to go to Oxford. I wasn’t some kid from the north with some really fookin extreme accent.  By the end of the first term, my slight accent had gone. Although I was the only person from my family who had been to University, there were a lot of people there like me. Everything that I experienced in its particular Cheltenham manifestation was part of a well-established set of symptoms and syndromes that have been painstakingly described by everyone from Raymond Williams to Tony Harrison to Albert Camus. I suppose it was more traumatic for my parents than for me. I was awful to them.  Whereas my friends’ parents were confident when they visited us at college, my parents felt out of place.  They were so humble to the Porters at the Porters’ Lodge.

MC: A porter like a butler?

GD: The Porters were in charge of the entrance to the college.

MC: So there was no impulse for you to write a book that did all the things Zona does, but was addressed to a more megaplex “moron-time” audience?

GD: Why would I want to address the morons? The thing is, in Zona, I’m not that different from the “morons.”  It’s not like I only want to exist in this realm of seeing Tarkovsky; I also want to be watching tele and football and going to the pub and all this kind of stuff.  It’s one of the classic things of our time, that you don’t have to confine yourself to low or high, elite or mass culture.  We can mix and choose.  My father-in-law—who loves Barthes and Beethoven—he watches the Antique Road Show, which seems to me an entirely moronic thing to do.