The Walberberg Conference is organised by the British Council and brings together a number of selected UK writers - in this case David Edgar, Jonathan Coe, Andrew Motion, Helen Simpson, Jo Shapcott and myself - and a group of about fifty assorted German-based academics, publishers and journalists. We give readings, conduct interviews and conversations and even do a little Creative Writing. Our UK contingent proved to be a happy band and since these Notes do not deal with gossip or anecdote it is enough to say the whole thing seemed to go extremely well.

But what is the 'thing' that 'goes well'? In the abstract the project would appear to be diplomatic, worthwhile, amusing, rather Malcolm Bradbury, but potentially a little self-important and managerial.

Perhaps the experience that struck home most to me was the quality and intensity of listening among our German hosts. Readings were scheduled for forty minutes each at a single stretch: twice as long as in England, where the fear of boredom and politely rampant egotism is unobtrusively blended with short-term concentration and philistinism to create a faintly apologetic, entertain 'em and get off approach. Sometimes the word 'healthy' is attached to the notion of philistinism, probably out of a sense of unease that the very concept of philistinism might conjure its notional antithesis, which is...? Good question. What precisely is the antithesis we fear? Preciousness? Aestheticism? Effeteness? Solemnity? Humourlessness? An 'unhealthy' intellectuality, connoting dryness, absoluteness, perhaps even militarism of what the English think of as the 'Prussian' kind?

These are speculations. Anyone who feels like it could write to me and add or subtract a descriptor or two, but I confess I enjoyed it. It made a nice change from appearing as a 'writer' , which is to say a personality, as we often do here; to appear, if you like, as 'writing' instead. The earnestness of the listening then is a compliment to the writing rather than to the charms or otherwise of the writer.

Odd how both in India and in Germany there is the same intense willingness to listen. I don't suppose we would often couple the two nations and cultures: they are utterly different in many respects, yet, perhaps for quite distinct reasons that I cannot explore in such a restricted space, they care about writing. They are not gestural places. Maybe words lead somewhere more easily. Perhaps writing is closer to the heart of things.

My family background should equip me me with a wariness of Germany and all things German. And indeed Germany itself is fully aware of that in a general way. On the last night our conversation in a small group came round to Leni Riefenstahl. I said that the some of the images of the Berlin Olympiad taken in isolation - the discus thrower for instance - were in fact beautiful and that our anxiety about them might be retrospective. I could sense the edgy anxiety at my proposition. I don't even know whether I fully believe in the proposition myself. It wasn't mischievous of me to float it like that, but it might have been perceived so. Nothing is completely finished with. But I was aware that my poems had been genuinely heard. That they had become a small, but properly attended factor.

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