Colm Tóibín

So you begin to sort of move in the water in ways you can't control and you're underwater.

And freeing yourself of that is a big moment where he says, okay, put your arms right out now.

But for a while, you're sort of...

You know, you're just almost weightless for a while in the water, clasping your own knees.

I don't know if you clasp your own knees in the womb, but you must be in that sort of funny folded or curled position.

That's my Monday morning.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you can swim much faster if you keep your head under the water.

I mean, one of the things I suppose is that with people who are very glamorous, you'd really like to be with them naked, you know, rather than all their clothes.

You have to think about that sometimes.

But, oh, I know, I worked briefly for Esquire.

And all the guys there were really, it was a lot of fashion.

And I came up with the idea, you know, there were meetings where we met to come up with ideas that we should get all the poets of England or as many as we could find to model for Esquire.

And we discovered how beautiful all the poets were.

We got Steven Spender as the oldest one.

He looked marvelous.

He really did.

Andrew Motion.

Michael Hoffman, Michael Donaghy, Don Patterson, all of them were, the men were so exquisite.

And they looked so, they looked so really, they looked so good in good clothes.