British

Video. The transcription reads almost like a Monty Python sketch. Christopher Reid’s eager, jolly face and the reporter’s over-enunciation of his consonants are disconcertingly hilarious as they discuss the death of Reid’s wife. 

BBC: Now your wife Lucinda Gane was actually quite well known in her own right. She was an actress…she was also an admired maker of patchwork quilts. This is a book in four parts: the first written after she had been diagnosed with cancer while you were on holiday in Crete and the other three parts written after her death. At what point did you think to yourself, “I should make a book of poetry out of this experience?”

Reid: Well, I think, probably because this is the way poets work - opportunistically, as soon as she knew she was ill…And she’d been given a, em, excuse the phrase, deadline.