Jonathan Meades on god, football and brutophilia – and why his memoir was 17 years late

This is a transcript of a talk, ‘Composing the Past’, given by Jonathan Meades at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh on 26 August 2015, about writing An Encyclopaedia of Myself, which won the Spears Memoir Prize and was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley award

The most recent film I made was on the sculptural neo-expressionistic architecture of the late 50s, 60s and early 70s – known as brutalism after the French for raw concrete, beton brut or bru, depending on how costive with consonants the speaker is. This film has had bizarre and unintended consequences.

Forty years ago two fine comic actors, both now dead, John Fortune and John Wells, collaborated on a novel called A Melon For Ecstasy. The title comes from a Turkish proverb: ‘A woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, a melon for ecstasy’. The protagonist of this squib was a dendrophile: dendrophilia is the condition of being sexually aroused by trees.