I hesitate to imagine what might have been Philip Larkin’s reaction to being declared “the Greatest British Writer since 1945” by The Times, ahead of such distinguished quill-wielders as Orwell, Amis (the Older and Younger), Tolkien and even the all-conquering J. K. Rowling. Something between a grunt and a grimace, I would guess.

But the reaction from other quarters of the literary world has been chilly: a mixture of surprise, disdain and indignation. Surprise that our literary editor, Erica Wagner, should award top spot in her list of postwar greats to a “mere” poet – and one, moreover, who penned fewer words in his career than Trollope or Dickens customarily churned out in a month. Disdain that in an era when so many literary “giants” produce tomes of labyrinthine complexity, The Times should have chosen a writer who can be understood by anybody. You encounter the same reaction whenever the paintings of another great 20th-century British genius, L. S. Lowry, sell for millions: a shocked snobbery that someone so provincial, so unpretentious, so rooted in the bleak urban wastelands of working-class Britain rather than the chic cafés of Hampstead, should have won such fame and esteem.

And indignation because Larkin was to political correctness what Dame Barbara Cartland was to sumo wrestling. He was bitter and curmudgeonly; he was (by 21st-century standards) racist and sexist; he drooled over mild porn and even wrote some; and he sometimes treated shamefully those who loved him. In this newspaper Peter Ackroyd called him a “foul-mouthed bigot” who was prone to “rancid and insidious philistinism” – and that was one of the nicer tributes. A. N. Wilson once described him as a “petty-bourgeois fascist”. As with Wagner, any appreciation of Larkin has to stem from a belief in the paradox that life-affirming art can be, and often is, created by nasty people.

So the choice of Larkin needs defending. Our literary editor has already offered her eloquent justification. But since Larkin speaks more directly and pertinently to me than any other 20th-century poet, perhaps I could add my tuppennyworth of support.

Where the metropolitan literary elite go horribly wrong in their assessment of Larkin, it seems to me, is in belittling him as a parochial grumbler whose appeal is strictly limited to other parochial grumblers – ie, the provincial English middle-classes. “Larkin’s narrowness suits the English perfectly,” wrote the poet and critic Charles Tomlin-son. “They recognise their own abysmal urban landscapes, skilfully caught with just a whiff of English films c 1950. The stepped-down vision of human possibilities (no Renaissance, please), the joke that hesitates just this side of nihilism, are national vices.”

That’s a typical criticism of Larkin (and Britain), and it’s easily swallowed. After all, if you sign up for the “Philip Larkin Trail” through Hull (where the poet whiled away his days as university librarian), you really do get taken to the M&S where he bought his underpants. His life was that mundane.

But I think this response is utterly wrong. Yes, Larkin had an empathy with little people living frustrating, frustrated lives. Yet his bleak but often brilliantly entertaining view of the human treadmill struck a chord across the world and in the most unlikely souls. Case in point? I once met the great American musician Leonard Bernstein, who composed West Side Story. The son of Rus-sian-Jewish immigrants, he was a brash, whisky-drinking, hard-living, insomniac extrovert, notoriously oversexed (with both men and women), volcanic in temperament, and steeped in the frenetic lifestyle of down-town Manhattan. A more unlikely admirer of melancholic English poetry would be harder to imagine. Yet over a bourbon or seven Bernstein not only told me that he regarded Larkin as the finest 20th-century poet in the English language, but preceded to recite Whitsun Weddings almost without hesitation (a minion was despatched for his copy when he faltered on the fourth stanza).

“How on earth do you find time to memo-rise Larkin’s poetry?” I asked in amazement.

“What else is there to do at four in the morning?” Bernstein replied.

That’s one reason for Larkin’s huge appeal. He chimes with the doubts and dreads and despairs that afflict us all, from time to time, as we toss and turn in the dead of night. Nobody has better expressed the sense of life’s futility, its slide into decay and perceived failure, than Larkin in Toads. (“Ah, were I courageous enough/ To shout Stuff your pension!/ But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff/ That dreams are made on.”) Nor has anyone captured the terrifying loneliness of old age, and the mental slippage that accompanies it, better than Larkin in the wise, sad lines of The Old Fools: “Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms/ Inside your head, and people in them, acting/ People you know, but can’t quite name.”

But even to label Larkin as the master of disconsolation is to undervalue him. In his best poems there’s something much more positive: a sense that, for those with imaginations to see it, meaning and magic can be found in the most humdrum circumstances. That’s surely the point of the climactic stanza in Whitsun Weddings, where Larkin compares the newly-married couples on the train chugging to London to a sheaf of arrows, “ready to be loosed with all the power that being changed can give”.

It’s this remarkable ability to observe the ordinary and discover the sublime – to “see a world in a grain of sand” as an even greater English poet put it – that makes Larkin so memorable. And of course he did write the most comforting line in all poetry – “What will remain of us is love” – even if he did place it in a context (a stone-cold effigy of medieval lovers) that suggests he couldn’t quite believe the sentiment himself.

No question, he’s a worthy choice to be Literary Top Cat. I take off my cycle clips in awkward reverence, as he once wrote.

I’m learning the era of my ways

Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Philip Larkin, but I have entered 2008 with a sense of calendrical dread. Why? Because at some point during this year the gap between my birthdate and the present time will begin to exceed the gap between my birthdate and the end of the 19th century. In other words, from that moment on I will be closer, chronologically, to people born in the Victorian era than I will to babies born now.

And not just chronologically, either. Bamboozled by everything from iPods to reality TV shows, infuriated by the jejune antics of baby-faced political apparatchiks who somehow find themselves running government ministries, exasperated by modern Britain’s apparent inability even to mend a railway on time, I’m beginning to think that I’m spiritually closer to the Victorians, too.

Is there a medical term to describe the realisation that one belongs in a different historical epoch? Apart from acute depression, I mean.

More mustard please

Still, those of us who have hit the Zimmer-frame side of 37 can at least take comfort from recent remarks by Miss Sharon Stone. The mature but still magnificent Hollywood sex bomb has informed the magazine Harper’s Bazaar that she finds sex “more alluring” now that she’s almost through her roaring forties and contemplating her frisky fifties. “When you’re young,” she adds, “it’s like eating a sandwich.”

Know what you mean, Sharon. But as I sit here at my desk, thoughtfully masticating my mid-morning BLT with its stringy, indigestible bacon rind, its limp sprig of lettuce and its shrivelled sliver of tomato that long ago lost all its natural juices, I can’t help thinking that sex doesn’t become any less sandwich-like as you get older.

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