A Delightful Evening

My goodness what a delightful evening we had. I was invited to give a poetry lecture at Floor 6 of Commercial Union House in Newcastle.
Since young people have quite a short attention span it was agreed that the lecture should be punctuated with interludes of music and dance by some dear young people called Neal, Lee, John and Alex - Alex is of the female gender, by the way and wears some quite startling eye make-up.


Neal and Lee are very accomplished musicians playing a range of instruments from 'cello and viola to trumpet and trombone - such talent and virtuosity! I do hope that we will have the opportunity of sharing a stage again in the future.

The audience was very friendly and responsive - though for the life of me I never understand why people are apt to giggle at some of the most profound of my poems. Nonetheless, many of them came to me later to say how much they had enjoyed it. I am thinking of starting a writing group of my own since these youngsters are clearly hungry for literary education of the kind that only I can gi ve.

I took the last two Jimmys along - Jimmy 25 in his glass coffin, and Jimmy 26 who was turned into a keyring by a clever taxidermist. Jimmy 28, still in a bag of water came along for the ride as well.

Thank you to Jonathan at CU House for the kind invitation and generous remuneration.

I was also able to announce that I will be appearing again at the Gay Pride Festival in July which is exciting, though I'm not sure what it's all about. Never mind, as long as they are eager for some real poetry I'm sure we'll all have a lovely time.