There is a bare 60-watt bulb in the centre of the ceiling. The landlord has not considered it necessary to light the fire. He stands behind the bar, bald and shining, offering beer with menaces.
The host is Dave. He begins with a brief welcome, a regret that numbers are down tonight, then reads to the end of his nose an informally arranged sonnet about a man who marries the same woman twice. (Dave, it is well known, has done this himself.)
Then a woman in a skimpy dress introduces herself in what might be a Russian accent. She tells us she confines herself to odes on the subjects of Princess Diana and the Euro. After fourteen brief poems, or perhaps one long poem that appears to end fourteen times, Dave asks her to have another go later on. She scowls, flounces out, spitting: But I have ten more yet!
Next up is a man who looks as if he steals children’s footballs and refuses to give them back. He smells like an oil spill. He reads rhymes about relationships and how his never work out.
It’s time for the star turn. Dave says she is a recent winner of an apparently prestigious poetry prize. Before she reads, the woman demands a table is provided. Dave finds a small one at the back of the room and hauls it to the front. No one helps him. The woman places on it a cup and saucer, then reads from a piece of paper she turns in a circle about a cup and saucer. Next, she tells us, apparently ad-libbing, about a man named Bill, who moved in with her and moved out, and a cat, also named Bill, who moved in and didn’t move out. Dave prompts a round of applause and says she will read again in a longer slot in the second half.
It’s the turn of a couple who, between them, cradle bag-pipes. As they arrange themselves around the microphone and amplifier they have brought with them, the landlord clatters and swears as he pours Dave a half-pint of low-alcohol Albanian lager. This is the first drink he has sold so far.
The bagpipe man explains he is learning the instrument. This is apparent, not only because of the flexibility of the arrangement of the old air from the porridge advert, but because his partner has to help, as he plays the pipes, by squeezing the bag. She also chants over and again: War Is Evil! War Is Evil!
I buy a beer. It tastes of soap. I do not complain.
Then the late-comer shuffles through the door in a stained Glastonbury ’84 T-shirt. He has bubbles of saliva at the corners of his mouth, owl-like spectacles, and carries a Greenpeace carrier bag stuffed with sheets of paper. He takes the next turn, tells us of his lifelong fascination with buses and, more specifically, bus routes, and also with the life of Samuel Johnson. His poem is about a bus going round a roundabout. Or, as it has several verses, several buses going round several roundabouts. He waves what appears to be an over-exposed photograph of a bus as an illustration. His poem ends with a punchy lament on the inconvenience caused by the temporary closure of the bus station cafe, where it is his habit to read Rasselas.
He thanks us for listening and leaves.
A nervous girl has a go. Her hands tremble, she coughs to clear her throat, twists a strand of hair behind an ear, takes a deep breath and reads a gentle poem about falling deeply in love on the day the world ends and we are all incinerated. Dave’s dog interrupts the end of the poem by howling in agony. Dave realises he has trapped its tail beneath the leg of his chair.
Dave asks brightly if the couple with the bagpipes would like another try. They would. During the clatter and confusion of setting up, I feign a coughing fit, wave an apology and stumble out. As I walk down the street I hear them strike up a not-altogether dissimilar version of the porridge oats tune. I hear the woman chanting: War Is Evil! War Is Evil!
In a doorway, an old man is smoking. He looks up at the pub window, flicks ash into a bush.
Bob Mee poetry and more 