It seems another world away now but my first job in journalism was on a small weekly newspaper in the West Country. Golden weddings, flower shows, parish councils, you name it, the news team had to turn the minutiae of country life into scintillating copy. Well, do our best, anyway.

After two years I escaped to London and became a feature writer on a women’s magazine. Friends assumed this would involve writing cosy stories about shopping, cooking and babies, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. The magazine was keen to attract a younger and hipper audience and I was told to interview as many up-and-coming rock stars as I could. While the other writers rushed round the world meeting the likes of Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise, I set off in pursuit – metaphorically speaking – of people like George Michael, Paul Weller and Morrissey.

Morrissey hit the headlines recently when an academic declared that he is a poet to rival Philip Larkin. I’m not sure about that but he’s got a wonderful turn of phrase. I once interviewed him over lunch at J Sheekey in Covent Garden and despite his dour, tricky image, he was charm itself. He told me how his mum always believed in him (even when he decided he wasn’t cut out for work) and that as a child growing up on a Manchester council estate he far preferred staying in listening to Billy Fury records than going out to play with the other kids. But what really stuck in my mind was his point-blank refusal to settle for mediocrity.

“It sounds quite dramatic but I would never be content to straggle midstream,” he told me. “I always felt that if I couldn’t have what I wanted, I would rather have absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps that’s why I always thought that I would be impossibly successful or incredibly inconsequential.”

Luckily for Morrissey he’s ended up impossibly successful.  As for the rest of us, it’s been straggling midstream all the way.