It started in a Year 9 Japanese class. The temp teacher, Mrs Brown, is to blame. Our regular – Jonesu Sensei – had chucked a sickie, and her casual replacement was of the traditional variety that saw her stand-in role as being that of baby-sitter. Herding us into the Audio Visual Room, she pushed the tape into the video player, turned and said, ‘The smart ones among you will enjoy this.’ Then she stepped out to have a fag.

I fancied myself as a smart one, so I sat forward for Postcard from Tokyo in a way that Jonesu Sensei would have envied, had she seen the studious fashion in which I ignored my Inside Cricket magazine for the next 50 minutes. That was all it needed. A few years later, as I edged my way around Cooks Hill Bookshop one Saturday, I remembered Mrs Brown’s words when I shelled out for a copy of May Week Was in June.

In the three years of university share-house squalor that followed, Clive James was my luxury. Falling into my hands just as I entered undergrad life myself, that copy of May Week held a special place in my heart – until I traded it in for the University of Queensland Press omnibus version of Unreliable Memoirs a few years later.

It felt right. While the University of Newcastle, Australia, in the 1990s, was a long way from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in the 1960s, Mr James would have recognised something of himself in the way my room was laid out: a character-filled double mattress in the corner, with stacks of second hand books propping up the crumbling walls around it. The stacks intermittently shifted positions and changed size, depending on the economic standing of the would-be writer who slept amongst them. One often needed to turn some of those books into chips and gravy, washed down with Export Cola – which was not for ‘individual sale’ according to the can, but could be purchased for eighty cents per tube from Scott St Takeaway, just a stone’s throw from where the Pasha Bulker would run aground 15 years later, on Nobbys Beach.

The early lesson I took from those first readings was the need for the artist to be in exile: whether it’s Tufnell Park or Chittaranjan Park doesn’t matter. It just needs to be away. I had no idea then that away would mean New Delhi, but it makes sense now. There might be people who can work the trick without leaving their suburb – it is, as May Week tells us, a journey undertaken in the mind – but I’m not one of them.

Having the unfair advantage of not being in my English curriculum, I read and re-read Unreliable Memoirs in all moods, dipping into it as an undergraduate whenever I didn’t want to study, which usually coincided with a deadline for an essay on one of the set texts. That soon led me to the essays, and the essays led me to Gore Vidal, W. H. Auden, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Martin Amis, Phillip Larkin and Tacitus. If I look now at the reading list I started making in the margins of my soft cover version of Cultural Amnesia – the hard cover version is clean – I know that I’ll never be finished mining the seam, and it comforts the eternal student in me.

That’s the other lesson. For someone setting out on the same path it is essential to understand that there is no end; there will be diversions, detours, places where you have to double back and retrace your steps, until you circle around and start recognising some of the scenery again – but it will only stop when you stop. Constantly learning – putting yourself in the stressful situation of not knowing a language, an instrument, or a dance, and struggling to master it – reaffirms and refreshes knowledge already gained, and keeps you hungry for more. It also humbles you. The Postcards series and Unreliable Memoirs are laugh out loud funny because of that self-deprecating tone, and self-deprecation like that can only mature after you’ve been told by a fellow poet that you don’t know how to count, or when a super-model speaks plainly about your absence of style.

Fortunately the modern perennial Australian lurks-man abroad enjoys giving away free advice on reading and writing. His memoirs and essays can be seen as primers for the young scribbler, all the way up to Cultural Amnesia, which goes so far as to provide counsel on how the young writer should deal with fan-mail and autograph hunters: throw away the letters and be nice to those you meet in person, on the principle that they could all be homicidal – not a bad rule of thumb.

Two others from the class of 1939 – Seamus Heaney and David Frost – falling in the same week did it. Since the news about his illnesses, I have toyed with the idea of writing Jamesu Sensei a letter expressing my gratitude for his career, but for anyone foolish enough to think about doing so I direct you to his essay on Heinrich Heine, in Cultural Amnesia, which correctly points out that fans cannot be distinguished from stalkers, and are often the same people. Even if you include an SSAE for the return mail, he will bin the envelope and keep the stamp – which is as it should be for someone who looks like a twenty seven year old Datsun that will have a hard time passing rego again. Whatever life he has left must be spent on his own prose writing and poetry – not on letters of gratitude for your letter of gratitude, which is not really a letter of gratitude but a letter inviting him to say that you are a good writer too.

And writing him a note expressing thanks for his life ignores the line he gave you for exactly this purpose in his essay on Eugenio Montale: say it in public, because ‘someone who knows neither of you might take heart.’ The Complete Unreliable Memoirs Clive James