Seamus Perry gives gory details on the career he didn't pursue

I’ve been reading Dylan Thomas, whose centenary comes this year. I remain slightly allergic to Under Milk Wood, while recognising its almost overwhelming charm; but in the shorter pieces Thomas seems to me a marvellous poet, knotty and tough-minded.

He is one of those writers whose work has been obscured by the colour of a myth — in Thomas’s case, a seedy alcoholic romance ending in premature death in a New York hospital. Among his last recorded words were ‘I’ve had 18 straight whiskies,’ which may not quite hit the note for valedictory utterance set by Beethoven (‘I shall hear in heaven’) or Turner (‘The sun is god’) but was nevertheless a remark clearly destined for fame. It was not true, by the way.

You wonder how else his life might have worked out — if he hadn’t been forced into touring America to pay the back tax, or if his time in the States hadn’t coincided with a polite culture of hard liquor.

Such questions are compelling because they call to mind in a vivid form an entirely normal predicament: any life is haunted by all the lives it didn’t turn out to be.

I know my own counter-life very well. I was going to be a doctor — I mean, a proper one. My A-levels were in science and I had a place at Edinburgh to study medicine. I hadn’t been called to an interview; so, to see roughly what I had let myself in for, I subsequently attended an open day at the medical school in Bristol.

We were walked through the dissection teaching room, where heads were lopped in half like melons: I suppose it constituted some sort of aptitude test. I rather liked it. Then I was given a peculiar interview in which two academics passed my application form to and fro, saying things like, ‘I see Mr Perry placed Edinburgh first’ and ‘did you say Edinburgh? How very puzzling.’ I liked them too.

And then, in a fit of uncharacteristic rebellion, I presented myself before the principal and said that medicine was not for me after all. His disappointment was almost as deep as my mother’s. I cannot now begin to remember what made me do it; but, having declined Edinburgh, I had to think of something else to do at university.

I suggested chemistry, which was my favourite subject; but, as a would-be medic, I had done biology and not maths. So maybe, um, English? The college worked hard to push me through an English A-level in a year.

‘If only they were waiting for us somewhere, the nights we didn’t use, the things we didn’t do,’ says that fine poet Hugo Williams. He is talking about love, but about the rest of our lives too.

I don’t suppose I would have been much good as a doctor, but that shadow-life crosses my mind now and again. A student knocks on my study door. ‘Come in’, I say, ‘and now what can I do for you?’ And so the consultation begins.

Professor Seamus Perry is chairman of the Board of the Faculty of English, University of Oxford.