Simon Turner on 'Boudicca & Co'

More packing has been underway this weekend, and is still ongoing, for our eviction next month. So I do apologise for the lack of blog activity yesterday.

Please accept instead this link to another blog, 'Gists & Piths', written by the estimable Simon Turner, where he has been reviewing my recent poetry collection with Salt: Boudicca & Co.

I've been working on a slow-moving review of Jacob Polley's delicious Little Gods, so hopefully that'll be posted up here sometime tomorrow. First I have to negotiate a lengthy phone call from the Open University, who want to interview me about my Ancient Greek blog as part of some research they're undertaking into how blogging affects or encourages studying long-distance - as I understand it. The life of a blogger, ho!

Evicted!

I had a great reading from Boudicca & Co last night at CB1 in Cambridge. The joint was packed, the audience laughed - and cried, which was a bit weird - in the right places, and I sold a fair number of copies of my new book. Since I'd thought to stow my cue in the boot before setting off, the old husband and I then trolled off for a game of snooker at WT's in nearby central Cambridge, which went on until about 2.30am. The place is run by a guy with an amazing handlebar moustache, like one of the KeyStone cops, and I've known him forever, since he used to referee on the ladies circuit way back when I thought poets were all dead and a good performance meant not getting knocked out until the last 16.

The club was a bit loud and youth-heavy, but after a few embarrassing shots, I somehow managed to find some form and started knocking hell out of the husband. My favourite pastime. It was not until the early hours, after some trouble finding the right road out of Cambridge, that we managed to escape the grips of that ancient place and toppled into bed back in rural Warwickshire just after 4.30am.

Grim as death, I struggled up the next morning to find a notice of eviction had been unexpectedly served on us. The landlord wants to sell up. Our departure date is set at July 16th, following three years of uneventful tenancy. Not the best of days then, after a fantastic evening of poetry & snooker.

We don't have much money at the moment. I have visions of us living in a trailer park soon. Would I be the first British trailer park poet, I wonder?

This is a little taste of where we live now, to give you some idea of why being evicted is particularly unpleasant ...