Jonty Claypole

I look very much like the picture of Chaucer that anyone can find.

Unfortunately, I don't have a medieval hood at hand, so I'm afraid I am wearing on my head a very clean, I want to emphasise the word clean before I say anything else, a very clean pair of pants, underwear for Australian parlours.

Yeah, they look great.

What is your nun's habit made from?

Oh, wow.

So you're confessing to blasphemy and theft in one sentence.

Yeah.

Well, Sophie, now is the day.

You'll come to the right place because let's ramp this up.

This is The Secret Life of Books.

I am Jonty Claypole, corrupt man of the cloth, going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, hoping to weasel a few coins out of my fellow travellers along the way to fill my deep pockets.

Reality talent shows like The X Factor and Got Talent and its many spinoffs began in the 1380s, if not earlier.

You thought I was going to say the 1980s, the 1380s.

And they were invented by the celebrated entertainment impresario Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote his medieval masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, at the end of a long career.

The Canterbury Tales are one of the most famous works of English literature ever and still a pretty compulsory staple in university English degrees.

Oh, how I treasure the months.

I think it was a year I spent studying the Canterbury Tales or Chaucer in general.

They've been endlessly adapted and translated, but most people would be hard pressed to say what they're about, whether the tales are poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction, and what Canterbury has to do with the whole story.

In this first installment of a series on longer poems in the English language, Secret Life of Books is coming to the rescue once again, Sophie.

It's just what we do.