My gig was for PoetryWivenhoe. I’ve gigged for them before but at their old venue of The Greyhound. This time they were at The Royal British Legion and it was a nice room, feeling rammed with the 50 or so paying punters they had. I did two sets and performed all the new stuff alongside a couple of ballads. It was a really special gig, the audience were sharp and laughed hard at all the bits I most like myself.

Afterwards I slouched at the bar and chewed the fat with the landlord Martyn before heading over to the Greyhound for a few minutes to watch Martin Newell and his pals jamming old rock and roll classics. That’s something you don’t see in your average pub – a bunch of guys sitting round and jamming, and jamming well.

I stayed with my parents in Coggeshall and the next day headed off to London for a pre-record for The Verb, Ian McMillan’s excellent language and literature show on Radio 3. It’s on tonight by the way, 9.15, I think, but best check that. I was there to talk about and read a sizeable chunk of my work-in-progress – REVOLT!

It was good to give REVOLT! another airing but I have so much more to write and I’ve got to restart the process sooner rather than later. I need to do some research and I hate research. It’s boring. I like writing rhyming, metered verse and not really much else if truth be told.

After Broadcasting House I hauled shell* to Paddington where I ran into Simon Munnery. He had a wheely suitcase. I was pleased to see I travel lighter than the great man. In fact travelling lightly is one of few things I am genuinely good at. I got a vile train packed full of middle class cunts** to Oxford where I was met by my good friend Tom, with whom I had a couple of pints and chewed the proverbial.

My gig was for The Oxford University Poetry Society (OUPS). The society is now being run by one of my old students – Anna McCrory. Anna is one of the most delightful people I have ever met and I’m dead glad we have kept in touch. Hopefully all my students will rise to positions of power one day and I can live the Life of Riley.

I had a longer set this time and used the opportunity to debut my next Edinburgh show. As it stands it goes:

The Paunch! | Jean-Claude Gendarme | Scandal! | Barry Vs. The Blob | Jeremy, Who Drew Penises On Everything | The Model & The Spot | Weekday Dad | Bloody Hell, It’s Barbara.

It came to 50 mins or so, and there are few little intro bits that I haven’t learned yet so it’s long enough. A lot will depend on what I call it as the title will frame the show. It’s not got a tight theme and it’s not telling a story, which is why I considered calling it Jeremy, Who Drew Penises On Everything (and other poems) simply because it’s a memorable title. Though I fear it might also be too silly and therefore put people off.

However, there is a loose common theme. All the poems have been written to be funny, accessible, bawdy and sensationalist. I have had a tabloid newspaper aesthetic in mind for these poems. For that reason I am considering the title – TABLOID! I think it would be a cleverer title but the drawback is that it might raise expectations that the show is more coherent than it really is. Or perhaps mean that I feel the need to shoehorn poems in more.

I think, on reflection, I will try the TABLOID! route and see what the little bits of script around the poems feel like.

I left Oxford after an average cooked breakfast in town and travelled to Birmingham at Thursday lunchtime. I’ve gigged in Birmingham remarkably few times in the last 13 years – last night was my 3rd time. I was feeling pretty ill (as I am now) by the time I arrived so I spent the afternoon in bed, which is a shame as I’d have liked to have seen the city beyond the depressing sprawl of interconnecting shopping centres that surround the station.

The gig was for Apples & Snakes West Midlands, which is run by the lovely Bohdan Piasecki. It was in the upstairs room of a pub called The Victoria, which is right on the edge of Chinatown. I was closing the gig and by the time I got on stage I was aswim in booze and snot but I turned out a pretty solid performance and the poems went down really well. In fact, I really enjoyed it – the audience were sharp and they laughed well at the jokes.

It’s fun working out which poems are your bankers when you have a new set. I have started opening on The Paunch! because it’s easy, not too fast and gets across something of myself to the audience. It went down really well all week, but particularly so in Brum where the audience seemed more comedy-inclined.

Jean-Claude Gendarme is the oldest poem in this new show (18 months now) and it’s a banker, except with teenagers who don’t seem to go for the Carry On style humour.

Barry Vs The Blob goes down better in some places than others – usually when the audience are more of a poetry crowd and they realise how tricky it must have been to write. That said, it’s unusual enough that it’s a real banker now.

Jeremy is perhaps a bit less so, it’s never bombed but it’s perhaps a bit juvenile for some audiences.

Barbara is perhaps a bit crude for others but the performance of it means that I get away with it, and besides it has enough clever rhymes to twist a few laughs out of any audience.

Weekday Dad doesn’t always kill, a younger audience is less interested, obviously, and the opening stuff works much better with an audience that has some knowledge of feminist theory (but really only a little is needed, it ain’t clever or anything). That said, I think most people appreciate the sentiment and it’s a nice counter to the filth.

I’ve done Scandal twice this week and I had really positive feedback from people in Oxford. It is really long and it is about politics so it will inevitably put people off. I will continue to road test it.

That leaves The Model and the Spot which is the one I’m considering dropping. Subject wise it’s pretty horrible as it stands and that will put some people off. Doing it as a duet with Tim Clare over the summer for Aisle16 R Kool! helped add to the sense of silly pantomime which is what I want for it, but the jury is still out on it as a solo piece.

I guess it all depends whether I write a suitable replacement before August, which I guess I might. Until then I will continue to experiment with what I have.

Anywho, I’m on the train back now. I’ve got a gig in Beccles tomorrow and one next Friday in Diss and then I’m pretty much done until after the baby has arrived. Lorks!

Oh, and I had a poem published in the Spectator last week. For those of you not into right-wing periodicals, here it is:

Clean Slate

You cheated on your girlfriend
so now she’s at my place bitching with my wife
while I carry your life
down staircases in torn plastic bags.

We load my car with lever arch files
in boxes meant for oranges.
It’s shabby. These things are not you:
the pink plastic backpack, the forgotten fleece,
The Tesseract by Alex Garland.
We shift unloved items
through the still night.

You show me your new house,
its Bond villain windows
and too many chairs.
You tell me about your new girlfriend,
she’s American, maybe you’ll go and live there.

I get it.
The attraction of starting again.
I talk up a clean slate as we lug boxes
and reassemble shelves. You toast cut ties.
Until the sweat starts to dry
and it’s time for me to go home to my wife and son
and leave you hanging curtains.

* I don’t have an actual shell
** I am also a middle class cunt, that’s probably what was so horrible about it – like looking in a mirror

That’s probably because I did a gig last night. A great gig in fact. It was in Wivenhoe in Essex, where I used to live about seven years ago. We had about 50 people crammed into The British Legion for PoetryWivenhoe and it was bloody great. I did two sets, each about 25 mins long. I debuted SCANDAL! and it didn’t bomb and the rest of the new material seemed to hit the spot nicely. I did two ballads (Chip Shop and Cartwrights) but I didn’t do The Model & The Spot, so I’m guessing I’m perhaps one long poem, or two shorter ones away from having enough for a new Edinburgh show, perhaps less if I do a bit more chat. Tonight I’m playing The Oxford University Poetry Society, which is as illustrious a society its name suggests. I’ve done a gig for them before, in 2009, but it was before I had written all but three of my ballads, so I’ll have loads of new stuff for them. I might try and do the new show in its entirety as I have 45 mins.

Anyway, blah, blah, blah – it’ll all come good in the end. I really need to start worrying about getting more of REVOLT! written. The stand-up show will take care of itself.

I finished the Hornchurch poems btw. The final one felt like pulling teeth but on reflection I rather like it. The problem was trying to talk up the charm of the suburbs when I looking down a stunning Yorkshire valley at Hebden Bridge and feeling totally bowled over by nature. That obviously influences the poem below, but it made it hard to write. The difference between my own poems and commissions is that I always 100% feel and mean my own work, even if it is something silly like Jeremy, Who Drew Penises on Everything. However, with a commission it has to get finished, even if you don’t really mean it. It’s the truth that is missing. The mainly matters to me, but I’m sure it’s lurking there for any reader. Anyway, now I’ve done it down, here’s the piece:

The View from a Suburban Window

My northern friends, their thoughts bricked-up with mills
and views that knock the sense right out your heart,
will never see what I can from this sill.
They think the very daybreak should be art!
But like the city folk they play a part
in something else’s life. Bits in a machine,
they’re still swallowed, it’s just a different scene.

We haven’t got the swagger of a city;
the boom of northern hills and sheer, sheer drops;
our neat, suburban streets are far less pretty
than Suffolk’s skew-whiff, wattled Tudor shops.
We’re mostly free of all those well-worn props
of poetry and art, thank God, it leaves
the local people room enough to breathe.

For life is not all ecstasy and tears
and most of us I think are glad it’s not.
We trade adrenaline for fewer fears,
we strive to be content with what we’ve got
and then we dig foundations for our lot.
So towns like these are monuments to peace
it’s narrow here, perhaps, but life is deep.

The other news is that my album – We’re All In This Together – is now available from iTunes (and other mp3 stores, or will be soon). You can ‘download’ it, like the kids are doing these days. Why not do that? Huh? Go on. Click here. More on the album to follow.

REVOLT!

2011, Part One

Let’s start our story in the present day,
well, cast your minds back, say a month or three,
before the heat of youth rampaged its way
down gap-toothed high streets – angry, cruel and   free.
In Britain, where we’re keen they Have Their Say.
In Britain, with our Big Society.
Before the Sky News choppers churn and whirr
let’s listen to an average Friday’s burr.

So London first (why not?) that town’s a beast:
the mouths of Oxford Circus breathing out
a smoke of suits and buttered skin. Up east
horns honk at Shoreditch High Street, dickheads spout
abuse from vans; while underground they’re greased
with sweat and slapped on tubes where adverts tout
apologies from banks with shitty grins
or vitamins. A dearth of litter bins

mean right-wing rags accumulate on seats
parading cancer causes, ubermensch
and ghostly girls strangled on their own streets:
Found with one breast exposed, concern is drenched
in gory details, then reduced to Tweets.
What price a victim’s shame when you can quench
the idle curiosities of millions
preserve it all in columns of opinion?

And every front page headline sings the chorus
of Brookes and Coulson writhing on their swords
The media serpent playing Ouroboros:
it eats itself to fill the Stop Press boards.
The lengths they’ll go in order not to don’t bore us!
The depths they go for tit-bits for their hordes
of hateful kids, insatiable and callous
raised on Schaudenfreude, sex and malice.

But come now, it’s not late enough for that.
Meet Nick, a journalist, the measured type
his paper shuns the tabloid rat-a-tat
of scandal, lies, skullduggery and hype
or so they claim, though still they have their spats,
occasionally some doggerel and tripe,
but mostly they were good and Nick had dreamed
of writing for them since his early teens.

Which, I should say, were not that long ago
young Nick is young, I’m guessing twenty-four,
right now, he’s drinking in the Barley Mow
with mates. They’re idealistic, talking war,
Murdoch and Arab Spring but not for show
they’re galvanised by change and want some more.
They talk of ’81, of ’68
Tweet apathy to rights until its late.

Then half-sloshed in his room as grime core scrobbles
Nick bashes out a blog, all left-wing gristle
while bottles smash on Cardiff’s carless cobbles
and shirtless blokes shout fuming, mad epistles
(well, Coldplay songs) as post-work geezers gobble
kebabs while trying to protect their whistles.
A hundred farm boys piss down safety glass
a woman pulls her knickers out her arse.

As thirty-something birds in York alight
a train all wearing Shelagh’s Hen Do tees
a lipstick pink, they plough the muggy night
in search of sickly shots and DJ-ed cheese;
of hairy-chested lads who like a fight;
of somewhere dark to get down on their knees
and spill their liquored guts like summer rain
to clear them out so they can start again.

While up the road in Terrington Samantha
Trample runs her MP’s surgery
blue rinse brigade not fussed about the bankers
just gypsy sites and NIMBY-ism pleas.
A few congratulate or simply thank her
(she’s just been the made the junior secretary
for home affairs), life’s good, so say the polls
last one of these, and then she’s off on hols.

She glances briefly at her Twitter app
that nit-wit from The Guardian has spammed
her feed again with bolshy, pious crap
re her expenses. Christ, you’d think I’d scammed
the needy of their dinner. Trample taps
ineptly at the screen, Well I’ll be damned
if this will spoil my night. She presses block
@NickTheDigger’s angry missives stop.

In Acton town a print works shuts up shop
and lays-off fifteen staff, progress I know
inevitable these days, a fair cop,
we’re going digital, we have to sow
our future’s seeds on last year’s mangy crop.
But you tell that to Si who has to go
back home and tell his pregnant wife the news -
they’ve fifteen quid a week for food and booze.

So Si and her sit in the strip light hum
of rented kitchen, bills and calculator.
She makes the tea, he taps the keys and drums
an ink-stained finger, a tuna baked potato
goes cold, congeals as Simon thinks in sums:
Fat use that evening class, a waiter’s
all blokes like me can hope for now, he sighs
upstairs their two year old son wakes and cries.

Let’s pass through well-healed green Commuter Land
where limestone pargeting, resplendent oaks
and rugged elms all dutifully stand
as sentinels to very English blokes
and nice, well meaning ladies, their lives bland
and inoffensive, their well-worn remotes
their weapons in a war on awkward facts -
it’s not to do with us, we pay our tax -

and venture back up North beyond the border
past Hadrian’s symbolic little fence
up stream like Salmon witness the new order
in Holyrood rehearsing arguments
that if successful promise English Lords their
comeuppance, where the atmosphere is tense
where harmony and union are brittle
and social norms are set to fly like skittles.

Then soar on shallow winds round Glasgow schemes
where bus shelter glass prisms on a fist
its owner’s missus totters off, blood streams
like Merlot at a wedding down his wrist
he doubles like a marionette and screams
Y’fucking bitch through woozy cider mist
we follow the expletive from his mouth
into the balmy night and turn back south

to Manchester where scallies, trainer clad
and congregating in a Moss Side playground,
lob Panda Pops and swear and giggle. Lads
and lasses pissed on youth, they make their way round
the terraced neighbourhoods their mums and dads
once did their courting in. They too will stay round
here their whole lives. There’s some things never change,
so what then makes these kids appear so strange

to Mister Habit popping down the Spar?
He eyes them warily across the road:
a female shrieks then spits, it hits a car
a large male taunts another, who then goads
him back. There’s pushing, laughing, it’s bizarre
and Habit picks away at it like code
imagining their habitats, their mothers
he files it all for keeping under Other.

And prides like this are native all through Britain
observed from front room curtain-twitching hives
they’re creatures to be feared or so its written
in frothing slingshot journalese that thrives
on grainy CCTV stills that shit on
any notion that these children’s lives
resemble ours. They say their love is lewd
their tinny music noise, their morals skewed,

their language just a badly spelt perversion
of ours, their clothes nefarious, their manners …
Huh! What manners? These yobbos on excursions
to London with their whining homemade banners
who trashed the Centotaph. A sad inversion
of everything our boys fought for in Flanders!
And so the haughty column inches spool
’til chaps like Habit fear the local school.

And add to this the constant thrum of ads,
the black dog of consumerism barking,
a lack of jobs or training, absent dads,
their local playgrounds auctioned off for parking,
their protests shunned, no wonder they’re half mad
these kids like third world countries always sparking
chin-stroked debate that’s never  acted on!
And so our camera pans to Clapton Pond

to street-light glow and Lisa Low who scuffs
her sorry way back home this Friday night
abandoned by Chantelle for Greg she cuffs
her runny nose, thinks Bitch, they’ll only fight
again, she’ll text by two. She’s had enough
of fickle mates,  she clenches her fists tight
and ups her pace, the beats bead in her head
a pissy stairwell, key in lock, then bed.

But nasty secrets seep through paper walls
her slack-jawed stepdad laying down the law,
a gruff hiss: All she does is hang round malls
she’s finished school, it’s time she knew the score
she pissed, on drugs, most nights, she crawls
back home gone one, I want her our that door.
And Lisa thinks how many nights she’s cried
in here, it’s not as if she hasn’t tried

to get a job, it’s just that, well it’s hard
her mate who had a baby got a flat
ground floor, two bedrooms, with a little yard …
… and Tesco’s all that hiring, pay like that
won’t get her nix, it’s like she’s barred
by all those smug, well educated twats
from anything worth having and she’s scared
she terrified she’ll always been ensnared

in nights like these. Turns over, hunkers down
and bites her lip and hopes something will happen
as Simon, wide awake in Acton Town
stokes baby’s bump and prays something will happen
as Nick who’s reading Klein his sorrows drowned
dreams fresh revolt and wills something to happen.
For anything to happen and it will
the riots in their minds are set to spill.

1381, Part One

Let’s marry our modern tale with the medieval
perfectly appropriate given the pictures of mayhem
those cynical scenes, sickening and raw
that’ll soon dominate our dreary sunday dinners.
Let’s hark back with hindsight to a heinous epoch
a time when people perished with plague
when nasty was normal and opinion enough
to have you hung or hacked to bits by henchmen.
Ta-ra then rich and restful Blighty
and welcome to a warped and wicked Albion.

To Fobbing where the fucked-up feudal laws
had eased as they had everywhere in England
since plague had picked off peasants like tics
and entire territories had gone untilled.
Now the lucre-loving Lords were desperate for labour
and men could demand more money for their work.
In some cases these serfs were successful in getting
a better bargain from their bullying barons
but life was still lousy and their days too long.
And to top their terrors off taxes spiralled.

Simon Sudbury, insidious Lord Chancellor,
greedy for the groats of good, honest men,
imposed a perfidious poll tax on the people
which tripled over time to a tricky three groats.
A fellow called Bampton was sent to fetch it from Fobbing
one murky morning in the month of May
and what happened would haul history to this village.
Let’s watch it unfold with Will Waterer
a big-bellied, bawdy ploughman of a bloke
and his rosy-cheeked inamorata, Ros.

Usually Will was not one for worrying
he just pulled his plough and prayed on Sundays
in the lazy style of a simple soul.
He didn’t like liturgies and he liked Lords less
but he nodded now and again like a normal
so he could make his way home for mead and the missus.
But there’d been talk in the town before Bampton turned up
and this had thoroughly stuck in his thoughts:
Three groats! God, where would he get it?
These loonies in London had no idea about the labourer!

The females fetched them from the fields at ten
and Ros, with child, her robes rucked up
as she hiked up the hill, caused his heart
to beat like a battering ram in its bone cage.
Right then he’s pay any price to the politicians
just to scoop his scrumptious squeeze up and saunter off.
He hooked a hammy arm around her.
His mates mirrored him, thirty muddy men
and their wives wandering back to the wattle and daub
of Fobbing to face the fellow from London.

Thomas Baker, landowner and Bill’s boss
was it seemed for once willing to help his workers.
Solitary he stood in the Village’s central square
his clothes cut from a cloth far finer than his charge’s
and made a speech to the muttering mob as it amassed.
Good folk of Fobbing, he flapped his arms about,
giving the geezers good reason to giggle,
a corpulent collector is currently coming
to this very village to vigourously relieve you
of your hard won and well-deserved wage.

Pray, what’s this prick prattling on about now?
Will’s mate Larry laughed in his lug-hole,
He’s saying that sod from the city’s a shit
Larry was about to bother Bill with – What bloody sod?
when a crappy horn cried out across the houses
and the locals looked as one to see a little
rabble of raffish fellows riding horses
approaching in soft sunlight from the south.
Terrific, quipped Larry, let’s irk these idiots!
‘Til the tossers take off to some other town.

He purposefully pumped his palms together
and followed Baker and the other Fobbing folk
towards the well-to-do wankers from London.
We’ve come to collect on behalf of the King
three groats from every Englishman in this area.
said Bampton sneering on his snorting stead
his fingers louchly lingering over his lapels.
As reeve, Baker remonstrated, I refuse
it’s risible and ridiculous to expect these regular
fellows to find that sort of fee.

Bampton just humpfed, haughty and hostile
he was more than a match for the mummsy Reeve
he knew his brogue was better suited than Baker’s
to public speaking and the peasants felt pressured.
Will! hissed his wife, you’re well-liked here
you must say something to this sneering city boy
or we shall all have pay his pricy poll tax!
Now Will was not one for waving his arms
not given to giving garrulous speeches
but for his wonderful wife, the words came easy.

Oi prissy prick! Yeah, you London prat!
Bampton flinched, wrong-footed, afraid
there’s no peasant here who’ll pay your poll tax
so sling your hook you sorry sod
go gather your groats from the guilds!
The mob of muddy men went crazy
shouts of Shits! and Sods! rung round
each beat the air with a brawny bunch of fives
’till the raffish rabble reared on their horses
and their towny faces twisted in terror.

Simon Sudbury shall hear of this deceit!
Bampton bellowed over the bellicose chorus
rucking the reigns of his reluctant ride.
Be sure to recount your cowardice kind sir,
Ros quipped to the cackles of the crowd
and the tax men took off, totally trumped
by the plucky protests of the Fobbing peasants.
A skyful of stones and swearwords following
while Will was lifted way up high and walked
through the village, the virtuous hero of their victory.

But as the folk of Fobbing frolicked and drank
the details of their disobedient deed
spread through the spindly streets of Essex
like herpes in a half-priced whorehouse.
Stories bubbled in Basildon and Brentwood,
rumours raged through Rettendon and Stanford
discontent drove them down to Kent
across the corn-growing county of Hertfordshire
and lastly to London where the Lord Chancellor
pounded his palsied fist in his palm.

However, I disagree with Sawyer when she (sort of concludes) that “perhaps we should all adopt the kids-on-the-bus attitude: accept that everyone is different, make jokes about it, but don’t take offence unless it’s meant. As Finn said to me: “It’s about how you take a word, as much as what people mean by it. It’s just words.” How personal do you want to get?”

I really don’t think dumbing down is the answer. Words mean things and while those words will shift in meaning over time we need to be aware of where they have come from and what they mean for huge numbers of people. Sawyer mentions that the youth she meets at Live magazine use the word “gay” to mean “rubbish.” I have heard hundreds of kids defend the use of the word “gay” saying it means “rubbish.” And why does it mean that, I wonder? Am I really to believe as kids have tried to convince me that “it used to mean happy, and now it means rubbish.” Bollocks! Casual homophobia is rife amongst school kids today and ignorance of what they are doing should not be an excuse.

We are never going to get this 100% right and I don’t think freedom of speech should be curved. But we should similarly not drown out the cries of “politically incorrect!”

I think there are essentially two different attitudes. You can say: “we should all lighten up a bit,” or you can say: “we should take time to understand words and understand the effect they have.” I think we should be going for the latter option. Educating ourselves and using language in a more nuanced way is surely a better option than just saying anything, no matter how offensive, and qualifying it with context.

It was a lovely show as usual. I realised as I left that I probably won’t be back on the show until our baby arrives. That is indeed … I was going to say “sobering news” which is perhaps too much, it will after all be a very happy thing. However, it is a reality check. I need to sleep now. Sleep lots.

Here are me poems, short topical one and then the Twiggy piece, which is written in heroic couplets. I love heroic couplets, they are so wonderfully camp and silly.

The race for The White House has started in earnest
the world is along for the ride
they’re shooting their shotguns up into the ether
and claiming the Lord’s on their side.
And 2008 seems a long time ago
when I hear Rick Santorum’s shrill voice
and I know that the church is inclusive and that
but they can’t all be Jesus’ Choice.

*

Dear listener, you’ll be surprised to hear
that if you were to go back several years
and listen to my teenage poetry
it’s possible you might think less of me.
And you’d be right, for truly I was dreadful:
pretentious woe and bathos by the shedful
and so we must not harshly judge my dad
who went a shade of white and looked quite sad
when I announced for better or for worse
I planned to make a living from this wretched verse.

But credit where it’s due and here it is
he lets my mother drag him to my gigs
and though I’m sure he finds the most part vile
occasionally I see him crack a smile.
And that’ll do for me, my ego fed,
but then this week the thing turned on its head
I told him that our star guest was a biggy
and then the ears perked up, “oh really, Twiggy?
I wonder, Luke if could I lend a hand …”
my once suspicious father’s now my biggest fan.

So thank-you Twiggy, truly, much obliged
our father-son relationship now thrives
our living room has one less elephant
for now, at least, my doggerel’s more relevant.

After the prize-giving I had to give a speech. I didn’t prepare anything on paper, I obviously gave it some thought before hand, but as I stepped up to the podium in that MASSIVE hall I wasn’t entirely sure how to start. I wasn’t sure if this was deliberate attempt to be off-the-cuff or a monumental game of social-chicken with my own sloth. On reflection I think it was the former. I was genuinely moved by the experience. Each of those students stepping up on stage to receive their certificates is the star of a story just beginning. Some of those stories will end gloriously, other less so, but there in front of me was life itself.

It made me realise how important our roots are, how all our stories start somewhere. It made me remember Kevin Murphy who used to teach English at 6th Form College and who gave me my first ever gig on The Concourse. To him it was a small favour, letting an enthusiastic student read his (rubbish) poems at lunchtime in front of a largely hostile crowd of townies who were trying to eat their lunch, but to me it was a small step that lead to half my life.

I have no doubt some of those students are unmoved by their time at that college, some might still be waiting for those tiny/huge moments, but there are plenty of others who will have been set on a monumental path by a teacher or peer in the last two years. I felt humbled to be a guest of honour last night; that someone trusted me to say a few words to bring an event like that to a close. I hope I acquitted myself well. People didn’t avoid me afterwards, so I don’t think it was an utter disaster.

After the event I had a lovely time talking to old teachers and a few Saturday Live listeners. Which reminds me, I’m on Saturday Live tomorrow with none other than Twiggy, who my dad informs me is “a bit of alright.” Maybe I’ll write a poem about my dad fancying Twiggy. It was embarrass my dad (and probably Twiggy too) and that is reason enough.

* I’d like to stress that I never did this. That was a joke.