Our Friends in the North

I came, I saw, I was nervous. Tonight's Verberate was again successful, despite the weather. I was perhaps not that sensible in my choice of poems (my first was about the London bombings) coming straight after a song about an Orangutan and a prose piece about whether poodles shit is white, but hey, anything can be reduced to its elements, and that's unfair to both those pieces (though there was a bit of an Ape theme to the night, odd that) - overall it was a good evening, and just standing up there in front of a crowd for the first time in a while is refreshing. I once started a reading by punching my hand in the air and shouting "Hello Birmingham" in imitation of rock stars everywhere, which puzzled the hell out of people. Lesson 1: don't confuse the audience. I've only twice been to a reading in London, yet on both occasions they couldn't wait to get the poets/writers off stage so they could listen to bangin' techno or whatever it was they were into back-in-the-day. So a wet Monday night in Withington, forty or fifty appreciative people in a bar. Hello Birmingham!