My memories are hazy because a lot of water has gone down the plughole since then, but I recall that we had to be at the studio early because our segment of the show was pre-recorded.

My mother insisted that I put a jacket and tie on, and combed my hair into what she called a "proper style", and I remember us sitting in the green room and Austin Mitchell putting his head round the door and asking if we could possibly play the Calendar theme tune. We scratched out heads and, as I recall, we did it. Just about. Then we rushed home and we got back just in time to see ourselves on the tiny screen that TV's seemed to have in those days; I was the nervous looking one at the end in the suit, the one with his hair piled up on his head like a kind of ur-Amy Winehouse.

Anyway, you'd think that brief appearance would have fired me up to make a career in television but it didn't; I just wanted to be a poet. I wanted to wander lonely rather than spouting into a camera about wandering lonely.

Then, in the mid-1990s, I started to make little television segments with my mate Dave; they were on the Tonight programme, the one broadcast after Calendar, and Dave and I had a lot of fun.

I was re-invented as Yorkshire Television's Investigative Poet,
signing off each time with a rhyme and a reference to the Darfield Bus. We made dozens of films including one about a bloke who buried
himself alive in a field near Darfield in the 1960s; one about a bus that took disabled people to Meadowhall; one about Barnsley FC's season in the Premiership and one about Bert Lee, the author of Knees Up
Mother Brown who, amazingly, came from Ravensthorpe near Huddersfield, and I can still recall the rhyme I finished off with: 'To me/Bert Lee/Should have been a cockernee/all the Knees Up Mother Brown/should have come from London Town...' Sheer genius!

Then the British Council invited me to Mexico to read my poems to baffled Mexicans and Dave and I suggested to YTV that we could make a little travel film. They said "Yes" and we hired a local crew and, because their video systems were different to ours, we had to take a load of equipment across with us in several heavy boxes.

At Gatwick Airport on the way over, we asked about paying excess baggage and the nice people at British Airways just waved us through, and after wonderful adventures in Mexico (ask me some time about the rose seller in Oaxaca and the Dorado at the El Dorado motel) we came back to Mexico City airport and we expected to be waved through again but this time they demanded payment.

We were tired and sweaty and I really wanted to eat a Yorkshire Pudding (I like marinated grasshoppers as much as the next bloke, but you can have too much of a good thing) so I expected that Dave would just pay up but he didn't. And that's why I like Dave so much, and why I love his eccentric artwork and the way he directs me when I'm standing in front of a camera and he's standing behind it.

He asked the bloke behind the desk for a felt tip pen; he opened
his shirt and drew a heart on his chest. "Come on mate," he said.
"Give us a kiss and then I might pay." The bloke looked shocked. He looked for a moment as though he might kiss Dave and Dave looked startled as though he thought he might get a big slobbery kiss as well. And then the bloke laughed and blew him a kiss. And then Dave got his credit card out.

The reason I've been thinking about Dave is that I popped up to
see him the other day in his house near Harrogate; we sat and talked about ideas to do with television and art and poetry and then we
went for a stroll in a wood near his house where there were more bluebells than I've ever seen in my life. And maybe that's the point of
this column.

As we walked around the wood we remembered: we laughed about the things we'd seen and the things we'd done and the places we'd been to and the people we'd met and Dave pointed out that the bluebells were nearly done, that in a couple of days they'd be fading away. Like memories can, if you don't keep jogging them. If you don't keep thinking about them, and writing them down. And opening your shirt and drawing them on your heart. And...action!