My partner Rony Robinson and I hosted an event at Cwmdonkin Drive this Summer – Dylan Thomas’s childhood home in Swansea. It was billed as a sort of Yorkshire nod to Dylan. We were allowed to sleep in the front bedroom and to make our own boiled breakfast eggs in Mrs Thomas’s kitchen. Later we went to the Boat House and his writing shed in Laugharne, where spookily the waiter in the cafe looked like the young Dylan in this painting by Augustus John. He said visitors often told him that.

As teenagers, like many writers, we fell in love with Dylan, but even though the world’s gone Dylan-mad for his hundredth birthday, it can be a bit embarrassing to say you like him now. He’s not fashionable and in general, not really revered by poets – the gist of the criticism being too much style, too much floridity over…