Sometimes I feel like quitting the whole scene. There’s so much hype and petty politicking. But that goes on in your own backyard. So there I am again – up there on stage, with Mike, wearing my Greek sailor’s cap, and my heart having stopped thumping now, because I’m reading what I really (may I be anachronistic?) dig, and am serious about – POETRY! I mean Gene Wilder really works hard at being a comedian, and me at my funny poems. ‘Well’ I might say ‘this is an angry poem, because I’m one of those angry middle-aged men’, or ‘this is called “Poem-Ugly” because a lot of what I write is ugly. I try to strip the veneer from my everyday matter mundane existence, the extraneous matter in my grey brain; to rarefy to an essence the human condition, and all I’ve got left is my bare existential soul, and my poem – but maybe that’s not too bad!’