JUST WHEN...

...you thought you were dying of ennui you get spontaneously invited to a poetry reading thing in Deptford. You don't even have time to -
Shuffling in to a white wooden basement lined in old mirrors you sit on a pew (literally, you sit on a church pew) and hear the end of a cute young bloke who talks about sorrow and makes everybody laugh. Another man recites something very, very long with feeling and the Australian lady talks in between her poems about leaving a broken love to travel by bus from Calcutta to London in 1969, through Afghanistan and places we can't safely go to anymore; about how once you're a traveller you always are and you become more...global as well as regional. The man with turquoise cuffs has a guitar and sings about the government offices and about not hanging on to old ideas - letting go for survival, or at least that's what I heard. The guy with patterns and dreads taps his feet and rocks and those sitting on the pew all rock, an involuntary but pleasant audience participation. Rhymes, rhymes, repeating, repeating. Then comes John invoking Kerouac and he's the only poet here with his own Slovakian percussion section, his own personalised hat - but he is the one who is a poet every minute of the day and who, yes, makes us gel and this evening has now become an entity of its own. Then Rachel, or is it Russell? Well Russell is Rachel tonight and regales us with poems and tales of elf shelves, the missing piece of the Bayeux Tapestry starring cats, the Lion with cheesegrater paws children's book and about the geography teacher turned decorator who won't or can't just paint it magnolia.

And I'm not tired at all anymore.