Interruptions break the spell. Things are running along one way, then, suddenly, reality changes. Like many aspects of life, interruptions can be good or bad. When is an interruption mildly annoying and when is it cataclysmic? Who is accorded the right to interrupt and who must be interrupted? I’m so interested in these questions that I’m writing a book about interruptions. But in one of those small ironies the universe seems to enjoy, my book about interruptions keeps getting interrupted.

Today I’m in Porlock, a stunning place on the Exmoor coast, with sunsets boiling across the Bristol Channel and the Quantock Hills slamming into the ocean. There are birds everywhere – I’m told they might be plovers, pintails, whimbrels, wigeons, redshanks or guillemots. But I’m not just here for the whimbrels and wigeons. Porlock is indelibly associated with one of the most famous interruptions in literary history. In 1797, Coleridge was living in Nether Stowey, twenty miles along the coast from Porlock. One day, he woke from a vivid dream (opium had perhaps been taken). He seized a pen and began to write: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree:/Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea.’ Our poet had committed fifty-four lines to paper when there was a knock on the door from ‘a person on business from Porlock’. After this interruption, Coleridge valiantly tried to resume his writing but to no avail. He published the ‘fragment’ as ‘Kubla Khan’ with a self-exonerating note: ‘with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away’.

Since then, the Person from Porlock has become synonymous with unwanted intrusions and their dire effects on poetry. Yet some have questioned Coleridge’s version of events. According to Thomas De Quincey, the Porlock Person was Coleridge’s dealer, hurrying over with urgent supplies for the biggest opium-head in Somerset. De Quincey may not be the most reliable narrator here, though he knew a bit about opium. Stevie Smith was convinced that Coleridge had got stuck and was actually ‘hungry to be interrupted’. In a small coastal village in the late 18th century, the real danger was that interruption might not come at all. These days, in our age of interrupted interruptions, Coleridge would have been provided with an array of excuses: Twitter, the bleating of his phone, an Amazon delivery, a quorum of Romantics superfans arriving to TikTok outside his home, and so on.

The Person from Porlock is a compelling idea because – like so many random forces of the universe – it’s uncertain if they are benign, malign or something else. When is an interruption a kind of serendipity and when is it a kind of cosmic sabotage? There’s a TV interview with the late Jonathan Miller in which he describes his own encounter with a Person from Porlock. This was Miller’s jovial epithet for the man who persuaded him to interrupt a burgeoning medical career and enlist in Beyond the Fringe, alongside Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. The rest is comedy history. Miller wasn’t blaming his Porlock Person; he was delighted to have been Porlocked. 

At the other end of this spectrum is the interruption as apocalypse. It’s now half a decade since the beginning of the pandemic, a cataclysmic global interruption, to say the least. I first visited Porlock in February 2020 as reports of Covid-19 escalated and reality became increasingly like science fiction. The place was idyllic in winter sunshine, everyone walking dogs and saying hello. It felt like the beginning of a novel by H G Wells: perfect stillness before a calamity. The transformative interruption – the moment when ordinary life is shattered – is a plot device in many dystopian novels. One day in Woking there’s an alien invasion (Wells’s The War of the Worlds). One day in a quiet commuter town there’s a sudden blackout and then… another alien invasion (John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos). Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids follows a similar formula: everyone is mysteriously blinded, then… okay, it’s triffids this time. In John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, everything is running along as usual in suburban London when a virus wipes out all cereal crops. Now, it’s another bright February morning: blue skies, scattered wisps of cloud. I walk from Porlock Weir to Culbone Church. The path runs through tangled oak forests, along the coast, the silvery ocean shining between the trees. Returning to Coleridge, I’ve always felt bad for the Person from Porlock. That is, if they genuinely existed and weren’t just a figment of the poet’s imagination. I assumed the Person travelled from Porlock to Nether Stowey then back again, a round trip of forty miles across the Quantocks. 

Yet, there’s another possible version of events. It’s conceivable that by 1797 Coleridge had grown tired of being interrupted by his family and absconded to a farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, near to Culbone Church. I’m heading there now. The path turns inland, surging up and down like a rollercoaster. Culbone Church is tiny and ancient, the smallest parish church in England. Waves crash onto the rocks below, the wind howls through the trees. It’s a lonely, beautiful place. Whether he was interrupted here or at Nether Stowey, the story is virtually the same for Coleridge. He dreamed, woke, wrote, heard a knock on the door. Perhaps he was briefly scandalised that he’d schlepped over to Culbone for some peace and quiet, only to be interrupted anyway. Perhaps the fates have a weird sense of humour. But what a difference this would have made for the Person from Porlock. Instead of a forty-mile round trip, the Person would only have travelled a few miles. Far less of an interruption! They would have gone from Porlock to Culbone and back again in no time, and arrived home before sunset. The whimbrels and wigeons would still have been singing in the trees.