venn vill I, vill I be famous

Now that I'm entering my twilight years, I've taken to listening to Radio 4 during my drive to work in the mornings. This usually spans the period between about 8:20am and 9am, and so usually means the political cut and thrust of the Today programme. But if I'm a bit late or the traffic (usually round the Almondsbury Interchange) is bad, I occasionally catch a bit of whatever program is in the 9am slot. Which meant that as I was a bit late this morning I caught about ten minutes of Desert Island Discs, for the first time ever.

All of which is a rather circuitous preamble to my point, which is this: the guest on DID, as no-one calls it, as far as I know, was novelist Sebastian Faulks, author of such celebrated works as Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. This struck me as notable for a couple of reasons, firstly that despite his reputation and status I've never read any of his stuff (nor really had any inclination to, to be honest), and secondly that I met him, briefly, when I had a summer job in a bookshop in Newbury back when I was a student - he was doing a book signing for his novel The Girl At The Lion D'Or, so it would have been 1989 or 1990. Just to clarify, here's a Venn diagram for you: