Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

Why yes, this is a new departure. I've never interviewed someone twice before, but then none of my previous interviewees has ended up in quite such a different place, and not just geographically. I found there were a whole new lot of questions I wanted to ask him, about actually living as an author.

SHEENAGH: Last time we had a natter, you were still a serving policeman alongside writing novels about police procedure. Now, I believe, you and the force have parted company and you're living in Portugal, making your living through various kinds of writing, not just fiction but freelance jobs like online travel guides? How's that working out?

MIKE: Yes, I quit in 2015, but I’d been on a ‘career break’ since 2011 so – coupled with the move abroad – I was pretty far removed from all things police work-related. My life now is novels and freelancing, which is lovely most of the time but has led to some hairy moments. Until resigning from the Five-Oh I’d spent my entire working life on a guaranteed monthly salary so it took some – often painful – adjustment. At one point a year or so back we had eighteen Euros to our name, a hefty amount of unexpected bills to pay, and no more paydays on the horizon. Much sleep was lost. But you learn, and when the biggish chunks of money come in you discipline yourself not to spend all the cash on Blu-rays and booze, because, y’know, you have to feed the kids every now and again or they complain. It’s funny, I frequently have to disabuse people – especially family – of the notion that my life is spent bronzing my nipples on a beach in the Algarve, while occasionally typing a bit of crap for my publisher. We live in the mountains of central Portugal in a house that needs serious fixing up and where the winters are brutal. Both my wife and I work full time, often seven days a week and for ten to twelve hours a day. I think I sunbathed for an hour about two years back. But that’s the life of a freelancer, I suppose. We have to do it if we want to stay here, because neither of us has any desire to return to the UK – look at what’s going on there.

SHEENAGH: I am, I am... and wondering whether "what's going on here" is liable to reflect in your future books at all?

MIKE: The whole thing is just too depressing to write about, to be frank. I’d just point everyone in the direction of P D James’ The Children of Men. Or even Cuaron’s film adaptation; it stands up just as well. I worry that at some point in the not-too-distant future we will come to regard that novel – certainly the Omega section with its depiction of societal breakdown and state barbarity – as scarily prescient. Warden May, anyone?

SHEENAGH: We've mentioned that you are now an émigré, like several other writers I've interviewed – Barbara Marsh, Frank Dullaghan, Ruth Lacey.  Has this affected your writing at all? So far, your books have all still been set in South Wales. Are you finding it harder to write about Wales now you don't live there, or does distance actually clarify vision?

MIKE: It’s not the country, or whatever Welsh town or city the story is based in, that I have difficulty with now because I know Cardiff inside and out, and I have almost photographic memories of South Wales. It’s the police procedure and legislation I struggle with. As I’ve mentioned, it’s been a good while since I was a copper and it’s frightening how much has changed and what I’ve forgotten. I wanted to forget at first, I hated the job and was so happy to leave. But now it’s needs must for work, so I’m frequently on social media badgering old colleagues about stuff like firearms policy and radio etiquette. It’s one of my pet hates in crime fiction: getting the basics wrong, the plod vernacular and policies and techniques. So I do fret about that a little now. I’m lucky that my wife was a much better copper than me and has managed to retain an awful lot of information so I usually go whining to her first.

SHEENAGH: Are you liable to start setting books in Portugal?

MIKE: Lisbon features in one or two chapters in Ash and Bones, but I’m not sure if I’d want to have Portugal as the backdrop to an entire novel, certainly if they continue to be crime-related. I know the country has its problems but I don’t really want to know too much about its nasty side. After two decades as a cop I’ve had my fill of nastiness, thanks very much. That ruined Cardiff for me for many years, I had a real love/hate relationship with the place until recently because I’d seen some terrible things that skewed my perception of the capital and its people. I can separate it now, and see the good in the city while still writing about fictional bad things going on there. As for Portugal, perhaps if the local farming community are uncovered as a Europe-wide goat-smuggling ring I’ll write about it. Until then: probably not.

SHEENAGH: Your first two novels were police-procedural, but Ash and Bones was more a crime novel, though still very much informed by your police background, and I think the new one is too? What brought about the change?

MIKE: Honestly? Simple economics. Other than Booker winners, big names like McEwan and the odd fluke that nobody predicted would go stratospheric, literary novels don’t sell that many copies. My first two were well-received, and Pocket Notebook did quite well for a debut that was difficult to classify as it had a police milieu but wasn’t crime. Then in 2014 my then-publisher and I parted ways, and I was a little bit lost for a while. This was after I moved to Portugal so I had to have a serious rethink about how I was going to earn a living. I was also being nudged, ever so gently, towards writing something more commercial (that dirty word). It was either do that or give up novel-writing completely, which I seriously considered for a few dark months as I wasn’t enjoying being part of the business at all. In the end I got my act together and dug out an old character who’d already featured in three unpublished novels, and started writing. That got me a deal with the guys at Bonnier, meaning I could feed those pesky kids for a couple more years, at least until they’re old enough for me to put them in the army. And I’m still writing the standalones, they keep me from finally losing the last of my marbles.

SHEENAGH: Your protagonist Will managed to survive Ash and Bones and looks like being a fixture. This was also a bit of a change, as the protagonists of your first two ended up dead or totally dispirited… why did you decide on an ongoing character?

MIKE: I refer you to my last answer. A series is where it’s at, nowadays. Television, film and publishing are all desperately looking for the next big returning series or character. That ‘brand’, that ‘franchise’. I know some of this will be anathema to many writers I know, but thems the facts. You might have a beautifully written, powerfully moving literary novel but it won’t sell anywhere near as many copies as a pulpy, twisty thriller – probably with ‘girl’ in the title – and a female protagonist who has a drink problem/amnesia/a double life/insert affliction du jour here. Or as many copies as a crime series. I remember going to London for a meeting with a pretty powerful TV production company who were thinking of optioning my second novel, Ugly Bus. Once the coffee and small talk was out of the way, the conversation quickly turned to how the characters could be developed so they’d all return in a second, third or even fourth series. When I said they’d all end up in prison so you’d have no second series, I was thanked for my time and shown the door.

SHEENAGH: Weren't you tempted? Because I can easily see how they keep out of prison on that particular score anyway; the woman, understandably, doesn't complain. And I can see how both her story and the sergeant's continue, even the Bus crew if they're careful or devious enough... Does the consciousness of "series is where it's at" influence how you're writing now?  - I notice you still killed a promising character off in your last!

MIKE: The ‘series is where it’s at’ thing doesn’t even enter my head. It is what it is at this moment in my career: I have a deal to write three books, so that’s what I will do. I suppose that’s the police officer still in me: you’ve got a job, do it as best you can, then move on. So after that’s done, who knows? If the publisher doesn’t want any more MacReady novels then I’ll write something else. Your ‘track’ (i.e. track record of sales) is everything nowadays and if you don’t sell enough you’re out, regardless of whether you’re writing a series or not. A few months back I read a piece written by an agent lamenting how long-term relationships and nurturing by publishers is becoming increasingly rare, how authors aren’t given a chance to establish themselves or their ‘brand’ and make the publishing house some money back. It’s the nature of the business now, depressing as it is.

As for the Ugly Bus characters, the only one I’ve given serious consideration to returning to is the female character and how she navigates her life and career after those terrible events. That novel was a nightmare to write. It wasn’t just the ‘difficult second album’ syndrome. During the eighteen months of the first draft my wife and I were working full time opposite shifts, we had two children under four, moved house twice in the UK then abroad, I had another job as a creative writing tutor with nearly a hundred students on my books, and I was still to finish my University work. It was incredibly stressful. And then it was released to absolutely no fanfare and pretty much disappeared, which was heart-breaking. So I have mixed feelings about it – while I’m not sure I want to write another ninety thousand words following the same flawed/awful coppers, I’m hugely proud of the book itself: the effort it took to write, the characters and story and that final kicker that everyone gasped about.

SHEENAGH: By now, you must have had quite a lot to do with publishers, editors, the process of actually getting a book published and marketed.  What advice would you give a writer new to all that?

MIKE: A great question. It’s wonderful being published, it was a dream come true, and I’ve had moments – certainly in the beginning, with the people I met, the places I was wined and dined in – where I’ve had to pinch myself. But I always think of ‘The Wizard of Oz’, because as glorious as it is at first, and as terrific and enthusiastic as the people can be in publishing, you quickly discover what’s behind the curtain ain’t all that. It’s a job, and sometimes a ball-achingly tedious one, and occasionally a clench-your-fists-and-scream-at-the-skies-in-frustration one. And the reality is you’re probably not going to be a bestseller. You’re not going to become rich, or anywhere near comfortable. You are not going to be asked to opine on television panels or sit on a sofa opposite Jonathan Ross while you share ‘bantz’. I don’t want to come across as a miseryguts, but anyone who enters this world assuming they’ll soon be doing that Algarve thing I mentioned really needs to carefully manage their expectations or it will crush you. A bit of digging will reveal that the vast majority of authors out there still have ‘day jobs’. There’s a very good reason for that. So if I could narrow it down to one piece of advice, it would be: savour every moment, but don’t expect the world…

Mike's new novel, Unforgivable, comes out from Zaffre in July.

I've been thinking an awful lot about poetry anthologies lately, mainly because I've been reading an awful lot about poetry anthologies - I've heard, over the past year and especially the past few months, of umpteen coming out (even been invited to be in some). I thought at first it might be to do with the imminence of Christmas, since they make popular gifts, but I think it's more than that. The poet Jon Stone suggested on a Facebook thread that publishers found them more saleable than, for example, first collections by relative unknowns, and I think there's some truth in that, though I also think the very existence of Facebook is part of it - suddenly it has become a whole lot easier for an editor thinking of putting an anthology together to contact a large number of poets at once.

Anthologies of writing, prose as well as poetry, have always been an easy way in, a way to find writers you might not have known about and get a taste of their work so that you can then go on to read individual collections by those who please or interest you. In this respect they're very useful. Some, especially those on specific themes, have more permanent uses. They can show poets reacting differently over time to the same theme, like John Greening's "Accompanied Voices" about poetic reactions to musicians. Or they can show the reactions of different sectors of society - classes, genders - to the same event, like Tim Kendall's "Poetry of the First World War". Some showcase particular schools, which is handy for those who think in terms of schools, though to my mind the most interesting poets will never fit into one. An increasing number are "instant reaction" anthologies, got up in a hurry to promote some cause or protest at some wrong. These are by no means always poor: it depends on the editor's judgment and on how thoroughly, or hastily, the job is done, and "For Rhino in a Shrinking World", to take one example, is excellent. But I have read some I admired a lot less.

Ones that are purely time-based - Poetry of the Forties, Best of 2015 sort of titles - are, to my mind, only useful in the first sense, i.e. they give you a taste of many poets, allowing you then to choose the ones into whom you want to go more deeply. These anthologies are, if you like, the baby stage of reading poetry and I don't mean that as an insult, we all have to go through it. What worries me a little about the current plethora of anthologies is that I wonder if many readers are not getting beyond it at all, never delving deeper into one poet. I think this matters because, despite the critics' constant admonition that a poem should be able to "stand alone", one can actually often get a lot more out of seeing it in the context of a writer's other work. Motifs emerge and develop, as they do in music, becoming more haunting each time you encounter them. In a sense, when I read Louise Glück's latest, I am also re-reading The Wild Iris, Meadowlands, Averno and all the rest (and who wouldn't want to?). Poetry is genuinely more rewarding when one has more than a passing acquaintance with someone's work as a whole.

My other worry is in case more and more anthologies should lead to fewer and fewer first collections. Publishers only have a certain number of slots per year. I foresee many new poets who are well known in magazines and anthologies but who cannot for the life of them get a whole collection published. I don't actually want to read an anthology, note poets I should like to know more of, and then find there is no way of doing so, nothing behind the tempting facades, as if I'd stopped off in a promising tourist spot and found it a Potemkin village.

I have a poem in a new anthology of poems inspired by popular culture, Double Bill, ed. Andy Jackson, pub. Red Squirrel Press. It has poems by a great many different poets, on subjects from Frank Sinatra to Bagpuss - mine, which is called "Oral English", is about Julian & Sandy from Round the Horne and was inspired by an anecdote of Barry Took's about a puzzled letter he once received from a Japanese gentleman who was trying to improve his colloquial English with the aid of The Bona Book of Julian and Sandy.  His letter went as follows: Ichigoro Yuchida to Barry Took: "Dear Sir, I am reading with an teacher, The Bona Book of Julian And Sandy. Mainly for the purposes of picking up slangs and very colloquial expressions. My English teacher is well trained in the job, and quite able in every way as a language teacher. Yet he still has some difficulty handling the queer and funny languages, brimming over the pages. I should be more than happy if you would kindly answer the following questions and let me know what they mean in plainer language. One, naff is it, page 25. Two, he's got the polari off hasn’t he. Three, but did you manage to drag yourself up on deck, page 27. I am sorry but I can't see what Mister Horne meant. Sincerely yours, Ichigoro Yuchida..." Took replied, with urbane courtesy, and a correspondence ensued.

You can buy Double Bill here or here. And here's the poem:
Oral English

Ichigoro Yuchida, keen to improve
his colloquial English, puzzles over

a text with his (equally baffled) teacher.
They can't seem to find dolly old eek

in the phrasebook.  And why, during a shipwreck,
should Mr Horne laugh when our heroes

drag themselves up on deck?  So many queries…
in the end, they think best to seek wisdom

from the writer, which is how they come,
courtesy of Mr Took, to knowledge

of some comic stereotypes, a secret language,
a national habit of wryness, a way of talking

as if one could make a joke of anything,
of code, of hiding from the law, of love.

Dr Blair's cook is outraged by the storage of parts of dead elephant in her kitchen, while his assistant Gilbert Orum, who is to make sketches and engravings of the beast, finds his mind turning to mortality:

Never mind, Miss Gloag!" shouted the doctor […] "Just think that your splendid kitchen has this evening played a part in the History of Philosophical Experiment!"
Miss Gloag expressed her ardent desire that Philosophical Experiment would rot slowly from its **** upwards, die painfully and be ****** by Satan forever. […]

All I can think of is Death: the age of an Elephant; the age of Man; the age of Woman. Three-score and ten is considered the usual allotted span of our years. But it seems to me that the age of Man is either grossly exaggerated or that it has diminished considerably since the days of the Patriarchs, for the common age of death among the people of Dundee is perhaps thirty or forty, by which time the trials and burdens of the world have taken their toll; a fresh-faced young woman of eighteen may turn, in a matter of three years of marriage, to a woman of middle years, haggard, bitter, bowed, lined, grey; a man of thirty will pass, within a twelve-month, to a white-haired cripple if he suffers one of many possible accidents in his labour

Florentia the elephant died at Dundee in 1706, and remained there in a stuffed condition, having been dissected by Dr Patrick Blair. It will be noted that another death was imminent, that of independent Scotland, for the Act of Union would be signed the following year and the negotiations leading up to it were going on while Dr Blair (an anti-unionist, who would later join the uprising of 1715) was busy on his elephant; indeed Blair explicitly compares his own dissections to those of the Commissioners "cutting and butchering the Body Politick of Scotland".

Of the real Gilbert Orum, engraver, not much is known, but here his imagined journal forms the basis of the novel. It is rediscovered in 1828 by a man using the pseudonym "Senex" and published, with Senex's footnotes, in tribute to Dr Blair. Senex, however, is both an ardent pro-unionist, which means he has constantly to blind himself to the views of his hero Blair, and a prig who disapproves vehemently of the caustic, independent-minded Orum without ever understanding him. His indignant footnotes to Orum's MS provide a rich comic seam running through the novel.

Orum is, in fact, a thoughtful, fallible, likeable narrator who comes to have his own agenda with regard to the elephant. Blair, dissecting and reassembling the skeleton, sees it purely in a scientific light, but Orum has a sense of it as a living creature – indeed he ends up being visited by its spirit – and wants, through his engravings, "to ensure that the world knew what the Elephant had looked like, how it moved, how it lived". Meanwhile though, he also has his family's pressing financial problems to consider, and frequently staves them off by selling various bits of elephant to interested parties.

What is the elephant? We should never forget that she was real; she lived, and died alone and in exile (as will Orum's descendant who inherits the journal and hands it on before departing for Canada, only to die almost as soon as he gets there). But what does she connote, apart from herself? Scotland? Knowledge? A cause; something to live for? All are possible; the novel's sub-title, "A Huge Misunderstanding", rather suggests that no one sees everything about her, like the six blind men in the Hindu proverb who feel different parts of the beast and come to six different conclusions about its appearance.

A final irony: this book about a huge beast is easily his shortest and sparest so far. But that doesn't mean there's any lack of the usual wit, fascinating detail and thought-provoking strangeness that characterises his writing. I've read my way through all his four novels now, more's the pity, and cannot wait for number 5.

I’m thinking about plagiarism at the moment – well, everyone in the poetry business is – but not so much about why people do it, more about why they often get away with it so long. I don’t think there is a single easy answer, but two elements seem to me to be an undue emphasis on “personal story” and an inexactness both in writing and reading.

See, here’s a poem by Laurence Lieberman (The Osprey Suicides) which describes, in quite a lot of informed detail, an osprey diving on a garfish. Next the Australian poet Graham Nunn writes, or I should say constructs, a poem called “The Goshawk”, using techniques he describes as sampling, mixing, or, most memorably “ I’m reading a poem or listening to a song that a door opens and my mind flashes with images from my personal history. It may be a phrase, a line, a metaphor that triggers this, but when it occurs, I give myself over to the images and ensure I capture them. In doing this, the framework of the poem is used to tell my own story and parts of the original text are creatively appropriated in the formation of a new work”. Quite a few parts of Lieberman's poem, in fact, like the phrases “traces the periphery”, “drops like a discharged projectile” and “like a small geyser”. Hm. (It’s archived on this page, though you need to scroll down some). What Nunn does change, though, is an osprey into a goshawk. But this transformation seems to have been a little incomplete, because this remarkable goshawk is still, like the osprey, diving into the sea and hauling out a fish (mullet this time). That will come as a surprise to the RSPB, who are under the impression that the goshawk is a land bird which eats small mammals and birds.

This, of course, makes a nonsense of the “personal story” claim. The osprey poem cannot possibly have recalled to Nunn a personal memory of a goshawk acting as no goshawk ever did. The claim is, ironically in the circumstances, symptomatic of a modern attitude that a poem is somehow validated by being “true” or part of one’s “personal story”. This may in fact be one reason people plagiarise: if their own personal story isn’t interesting enough, they don’t think first of embellishing it or going beyond it, as you’d expect a writer of fiction to do, but rather of nicking someone else’s, like some wannabe mis-mem author who hasn’t had quite enough mis happen to them.

What’s more alarming is that it took me two readings of the goshawk poem to realise it had to be baloney. Once it dawned, of course, it was obvious; I am no ornithologist but I do know the habits of the commoner birds. That first time, I hadn’t read properly or carefully; I had registered “goshawk” as “bird”, as in “yet another bird poem”. And since the poem has been online for over a year without anyone, apparently, pointing out the error of this fowl’s ways, I can’t be the only one.

A reader who was a keen birdwatcher would have spotted it straight off, but so, to be honest, should most readers. A lot of people have been marvelling that plagiarists can get away with it for so long, and speculating that this just shows how few people actually read poetry,. I think it shows how carelessly we sometimes read. And, sometimes, write. I have read prizewinning (and non-plagiarised) poems which got some detail of the landscape or event wrong, not creatively wrong as in changed for the sake of the poem, which is fine, but plain ignorantly wrong, as in importing an animal into an island where it doesn’t exist, or making a plant flower in the wrong season. For any reader who notices this, the poem is ruined, because the writer’s eye can no longer be trusted: we are liars by trade, but you can only give the main narrative verisimilitude if you get the details accurate. W S Gilbert was dead right about that. The kind of writer who dismisses such errors as unimportant is, I suspect, also in thrall to the “personal story” notion. His poem isn’t really about the event or environment where it’s set; it’s all about him, and as long as he gets himself right, he thinks the details don’t matter. But they do, or they would, if we always read as attentively as we ought. My current excuse is that for months I had been reading books for a shortlist, as closely as I could, and I'd let myself relax as a result. Mea culpa.

Here's an intractable problem for you. The LRB has very few female contributors and it reviews too few books by women. A reader explains to them that she is letting her subscription lapse until this is rectified. Editor writes back. He would love to rectify the situation. But how? It's terribly complicated: "If you were interested, I’d be glad to discuss with you, perhaps in an email exchange, why it may be that women are underrepresented in the paper. I think they’re complicated; actually, as complicated as it gets." (They? Does he mean women are complicated? Or did he perchance think he had used the word "reasons" in his previous sentence?) It keeps him awake at night, but what can he possibly do: "despite the distress it causes us [...] the proportion of women in the paper remains so stubbornly low, the efforts we’ve made to change the situation have been hopelessly unsuccessful."

Poor chap. Can anyone advise him of a way out of this fearful hole?

Poets Against Atos is an online project collecting poems inspired by the distress inflicted on disabled people by ATOS, the body which conducts, on behalf of the government, disability assessments for people claiming a range of benefits and appears principally determined to do so in such a way as to add to their troubles. Many poets have contributed to it, me among others, (though I cheated by making a found poem out of quotes from various ancient medical oaths, which I was intrigued to find had a lot in common from Greece to China, and in none of them is to be found the injunction that it is any part of a doctor's job to save government money at the possible cost of his patient's health). Anyway, we now have the excellent news that, as was announced last night at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, the Fit to Work: Poets Against Atos campaign has won the inaugural Morning Star Award for Protest in Poetry 2013. This might be the moment to note that the Morning Star, and its poetry editor Jody Porter, take more interest in poetry than just about any other British newspaper, tabloid or broadsheet. Its weekly poetry column, Well Versed, has some brilliant stuff and is well worth trying to get into.

Bartleby Snopes' list of things that generally turn them off would be more use to writers if it weren't such a hodgepodge. It contains things that should always, not generally, turn an editor off, like poor writing, poor editing, undeveloped characters and punch endings, but also another set of current writing tics - second person, third person present tense - that are tiresomely prevalent but can work if well done and some overworked themes and settings - marriage, writers, bars - that can also work if well done.

I've judged story comps and know what they mean, though I'd put it positively rather than negatively: I would try not to sigh at the 15th story in the present tense, but one in past tense would probably have a head start (which it'd soon lose if badly written). But it's certainly true that there are not only overworked themes but overworked stylistic tics, and that's true for poems too, though they are often different. The last poetry competition I judged, I swear there were half a dozen poems about bees, God knows why, but obviously after the first couple, the rest had a hill to climb. (And please, don't bother to write the one about telling the bees someone's died, it must have been done scores of times.)

Another ubiquitous poem theme that, unusually, is common to stories too these days is caring for someone with Alzheimers. There's no point in suggesting people avoid this theme; it's clearly a major concern of today or it wouldn't be ubiquitous. But if you want an editor or judge to recall yours, rather than the other two dozen, you need an individual angle. Humour is a good bet, especially since in itself this theme is bound to depress the reader.

Poetry has its fashionable technical tics too - like ending on an "as if" clause, or what I think of as the Billy Collins ending, where a "but" in the last few lines sends the poem off on a whole different tack. It can work well, too, it just gets wearisome after the first ten or so. Similarly with the Simon Armitage What If Poem, where we start in reality but suddenly go off, like Corporal Jones, into the realms of fantasy.

I would not make lists, because rules are made for breaking. Tell someone that four adjectives in a line is seldom a good plan and they'll quote you "Sweet day: so cool, so calm, so bright" - and quite right too; as long as there are George Herberts about, there is nothing that cannot be successfully done in poetry. And there are limits to how far you can change either your style or your themes (which generally choose you). But if you want a judge or an editor to recall you out of a pile, it's probably as well to be thinking, not just "does it work" but "does it work better, or differently, than the next five s/he'll read in that vein".

This (by solicitor Louise Restell) is a fascinating article, perhaps especially to writers, and the more I read it, the less I think there are any easy answers to most of the questions it raises.

Most writers probably don't give a thought to what might happen to their FB profile when they die, despite the fact that it may contain fascinating background information on their methods, not to mention even more fascinating spats with fellow writers. All the stuff, in fact, that once might have been available to biographers or literary critics in diaries or letters - only most of this will not be similarly available, for though FB will "memorialise" a profile by providing space for an obituary and allowing Facebook friends to leave posts on the wall for remembrance, it will delete all status updates. (I don't know what would happen to comments by the dead person on the status updates of others, and it's an interesting thought, for removing them would inevitably misrepresent the discussion in question.)

This may not matter a damn to the deceased, but it does potentially matter to literary critics, and indeed historians in general, if we're talking of users other than writers. We probably record more of our lives than ever our pre-internet ancestors did, but ironically their sepia photographs, Mass Observation Project diaries, rolls of cine film and sheaves of letters tied in ribbon may still be there when our online diaries, Flickr albums and YouTube videos have long vanished in the ether.

It may of course also matter to friends and relatives who would like to keep these memories of the departed, to read through their status updates as you would a diary. As far as I can see, they can't, unless the whole lot is backed up somewhere else, which may be a grief to them. One could, as the article suggests, leave one's passwords handy with one's will, but the surviving relatives may not be in a state to do much about it for some time, which could be too late.

The alternative scenario, of course, is when the deceased didn't want their nearest and dearest to have access to their online persona, which may not have been the same as their real-life one. Both FB and Yahoo refuse to provide relatives with the password of a dead person, and the article gives instances of relatives challenging this. Though one can understand why, I tend to agree with FB and Yahoo (for a wonder) that the dead have a right to privacy. "After all", says the article, "if you’d written it all down in a journal or letter there would be hard copies for your survivors to find". Well yes, but you might well have intended to destroy them if you'd had time, and in the case of online material you might not have thought you needed to. Not giving your relatives your password strikes me as the equivalent of encrypting a written diary; it makes your wish for privacy fairly clear.

It's also possible, if you are a writer, that you may not want to remove material altogether from the web, but just to keep it from the view of your family. I'm thinking here of some fan fiction writers who work pseudonymously, and in particular of one I knew online, though I never met her. By what I could deduce of her real-life personality from interaction on forums etc, she was a rather conventional middle-aged married lady of, indeed, quite conservative views on most things. Her writing, however, was surprisingly and graphically sexual and violent; it was nothing much out of the way in her online writing community, but if her family, after her death (which was somewhat sudden and unexpected) had been able to access her passwords and pseudonyms and discovered this other side to her, I can't imagine they would have been other than shocked, not so much by the material as by the fact that they hadn't known her as well as they thought. Some fan fiction writers indeed leave passwords and other information with friends in the community, precisely so that after they die, their writing can stay available to the community but not to their families, who never knew of it. The writing isn't always of a violent or sexual nature either; it is just a side of themselves that they wanted to share only with a particular group of people.

This may well also be the case with the poor lad mentioned in the article, who committed suicide and whose parents want access to his online accounts. I can see why they feel it would give them an insight into his state of mind, but it's an insight he may not have wished them to have. I'm mighty averse to the idea that Yahoo or FB should be forced to give out passwords in such cases or, I think, in any case, but as I said, I don't think there are many easy answers here.

I do think folk with a lot of stuff online, like photos, videos etc, should think about backing it up, unless of course their motto is "après moi, le déluge". As for social media, it's easy to say that one should remember it is a fleeting medium and that anything you really want to preserve needs to be, at the very least, in a more secure online space like a personal blog. But in practice, you can't tell which casual post will turn into a truly fascinating and illuminating debate. A great deal of interaction between writers via social media is going to be lost. You may say, so was conversation in literary salons, but in fact the best of it was often recorded later in diary or letter form. Does that happen now? Is an admiring retweet any more likely to survive than its original?

To be precise, I now have a recording in the Poetry Archive, that magnificent project started by Andrew Motion, while he was laureate, to record poets reading their own work. (Though I also got to read a bit of George Herbert while doing it, which was immense fun, because they let you read one poem from someone who lived too early to be recorded.) There's a CD, from which you can find sample poems on the web page. Thanks to all concerned.