Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Fantastic Weekend

I'll be dropping into the Tin Angel tonight for the launch of SHERB, new writing from Coventry, published by the Heaventree Press. For those able to make it too, that's the Tin Angel bar on Medieval Spon Street, Coventry, and the event kicks off at about 8.30pm for 9pm, I should imagine. Here's the official stuff ...

SHERB: new urban writing from Coventry: edited by Jonathan Morley and Anthony Owen, and including poems by Jane Commane, Colin Dick, Jane Holland, Barry Patterson, George Ttoouli, Claire King and Michael McKimm, with photographs of the River Sherbourne by Jane Commane and cover artwork by Paul Blakemore

and then on Wednesday night, I'm pleased to report that I'll be joining a cast of top coffee-sipping poets at Starbucks, Martineau Place, right in the heart of central Birmingham. I was asked to perform there by their new poet in residence, Roy McFarlane, and I'm even going to drag my husband along on this occasion, who rarely comes to hear me read. But I don't fancy driving back from Birmingham alone, late in the evening, with the caffeine jitters ...

In completely unrelated news, I've just spent a fantastic weekend away from home and all the dreary responsibilities that children bring, seeing my poetry publishers at Salt just outside Cambridge and also spending a large number of smokey disreputable hours at WTs and Mickey Flynns in Cambridge itself, which are both pool halls. I prefer WTs personally, as it boasts snooker tables as well as American tables for 8 and 9-ball pool, and also because it just feels right on the skin, at least before night falls and the kids roll in: a darkened hall in the afternoon, that sepulchral hush and the occasional click-thud of balls, hidden away up a flight of creaking stairs from the shopping streets ... mmm, like coming home ... and there at the bar, oblivious to the pool tables, an earnest young man reading a book on Quantum Psychology. Only in a city like Cambridge, huh?

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