1st March 06

March 06

1^st March 06

It is only the 1^st of March, so I’m a bit early. Last night I went to the Lit and Phil to see Kevin Cadwallender, Valerie Laws, Kate Fox, Sarah Millican and Sheree Mack do their talks based on old Lit and Phil lecture titles. It was a really varied and interesting night. I love the Lit and Phil, the building is just perfect. I wish I worked there, but it is a distant dream since there’s no point in getting trained up to work in a library to be sent to one of those brightly lit places, where all the books are new and easy reach of the patrons. I liked the idea of the gig, to take old lecture titles and do something around them. All the performers used the starting point in different ways, and were all really good. But my personal favourite ‘lecture’ was Sarah Millican’s The Uses and abuses of sleep, which seemed to go down best of all with the audience, and felt really natural and fun. All I could think was I wish I’d had the chance to one, as someone told me the title of one of the ones on the list, which was Experiments with Balloons, and it seemed very very me. I can just see the slides! It was a fascinating night, to see the different approaches each reader took. I really admire comedians, all that confidence and presence. I feel sorry poets, it is so much harder up there when you can’t get the comfort of laughter and make audiences like you. Still, we do it; somewhere underneath it all we must have more balls than sense.