Just in case we forge links with the spirit world sometime soon, I’m keeping a record of people I would die to meet – lame pun intended.
1. John Donne: Because really, why wouldn’t you want to meet a man who is able to make that basest of human emotions, sexual desire, into something sublime with just words?
2. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Enigmatic, deeply conflicted and a writer of some of the most moving poetry I’ve read. His words, written nearly two hundred odd years ago, still have the ability to make your mind soar.
3. William the Conqueror: His sheer audacity, crossing the Channel to claim the throne of a country he had really no business ruling.
4. J.R.R Tolkien: Because he’s the closest thing to God in my universe. And because of his peculiarly tweedy sense of humour.
5. Thomas Hardy: His novels are one of my many reasons for loving Victorian England.
6. James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, 1st Marquess of Dalhousie: For some reason, he’s had a hold on my imagination ever since I was a little girl studying the evil excesses of the dissolute British imperialists in India.
7. Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington: He defeated Napoleon? And seemed like a damned interesting guy to know, back then.
8. Oscar Wilde: Because he’s made me laugh more than anyone real ever has.
9. Jane Austen: We know so little of the woman behind Mr Darcy. I’m sure I’d like to know what she thinks of all this brouhaha over him.
10. Emily Bronte: I have way too many questions to ask her about Heathcliff.
11. Sir Walter Scott: I’d like to stick him in the middle of all this postmodernism and see what he thinks of it.
12. Henry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge: Dashing, gallant, reckless are the most common words used to describe the cavalry commander at Waterloo. How could I not be intrigued?
