I was lucky enough to participate in a poetry reading last Saturday, in Caius College, Cambridge. It was packed, and quite warm (the rain that has been muggily threatening over the last few days is about to arrive; the whole audience was lathed in a companionable sweat). This season of the year, hot rooms start to smell of asparagus piss. The readers were Charles Boyle, Sasha Dugdale and Dan O’Brien, with me serving as wind-down, or chill-out, or anticlimax. It was, kindly and broadly, one of the best readings of this kind I think I’ve ever been to: here’s a photo of me looking stout, and hoping that the audience doesn’t realise I’m a fraud. 
(As I type this the rain has just hit. I need to put a bucket under the hole in my office roof.)
