‘Of all the thirty-six alternatives, running away is best.’
Chinese proverb
Literature offers endless opportunities for embarrassment and humiliation because it operates at that boundary where private thought meets its public response. Live literary events are the front-line, the human interface between writing and reading. Sometimes the two elements mix, sometimes they curdle, and sometimes they stand like oil and water, resolute and opposed. I give readings at least a hundred times each year. No single incident amounts to much more than an anecdote, but when taken as a whole …
I am met off the train by an extremely nervous woman in a hire-car who is generating a thermo-nuclear amount of heat and cannot locate the de-mist function on the console. In a cloud of condensation we drive to a local café where she restricts my choice of meal according to her authorized budget. I have forgotten to bring any books. I visit the local bookshop to purchase a copy of my Selected Poems and am recognized by the man at the till. He says nothing, but his expression is one of pathos.
The venue is a Portakabin in a car-park. The p.a. system is a Fisher-Price press’n’ play karaoke machine. I am introduced as, ‘The name on everyone’s lips: Simon Armriding’. A well-intentioned youth doing voluntary work for the aurally challenged (of which there is none in the audience) has offered to ‘sign’. He stands to my left all evening, giving what is a passable impersonation of Ian Curtis dancing to ‘She’s Lost Control Again’ and eventually passes out. Five minutes before the interval, a nice lady from the WI goes into the kitchenette at the back to begin tea-making operations. My final poem of the half is accompanied by the organ-like hum of a wall-mounted water-heater rising slowly towards boiling point. There is no alcohol but how about a cup of Bovril? Following the break, an old man at the front falls asleep and farts during a poem about death/suffering/self pity, etc. Afterwards, there are no books for sale but some kind soul asks me to autograph her copy of Summoned by Bells.
My designated driver, the radio-active woman, transports me in her mobile sauna to an Indian restaurant on the high street. She is allergic to curry (for fear of melt-down, presumably) but waits for me in the car while I guzzle a meal of not more than five pounds in value (including drinks) paid for by food voucher. I am staying with old Mr Farter in the suburbs. He has gone home to give the Z-bed an airing and to prepare a selection of his poems for my perusal, the first of which, ‘The Mallard’, begins, ‘Thou, oh monarch of the riverbank’. I ‘sleep’ fully-clothed on a pube-infested sheet.
Ungraciously and with great stealth I leave the house before dawn and wander through empty, unfamiliar avenues heading vaguely towards the tallest buildings on the skyline. It is three hours before the first train home. I breakfast with winos and junkies in McDonald’s. Killing time in the precinct, I find a copy of one of my early volumes in a dump-bin on the pavement outside the charity shop. The price is ten pence. It is a signed copy. Under the signature, in my own handwriting, are the words, ‘To mum and dad’.