Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song.

My goodness me, I'm such an ignoramus.

Marlow. Once home to T.S. Eliot. I feel I should have known that.

He lived there around the time he wrote The Wasteland ...

Lets look up and smile

a poem that meant the world to my father, and is very special to me too, studied in those hazy days at university.

Not QUITE enough of an ignoramus to think that Eliot wrote the lines about the Thames, which are oft misattributed to him. The lines were taken from Prothalamion, a poem written by the Tudor poet Edmund Spenser.

I DID know that Jerome K Jerome lived in Marlow and wrote much of Three Men in a Boat there.

I DIDN'T know that the Shelleys lived there. Mary finished Frankenstein and Percy wrote Revolt of Islam, in a house a couple of hundred yards from The Hand and Flowers.

I simply adored Marlow.

A beautiful town with such literary echoes.

Which writer could fail to be entranced?