The sheen of positive humanity is threadbare.

There are many people who are wonderful and kind, but the broadcasters and politicians seem to have little interest in them except during events that can be televised due to the volume of possible tears, whether that’s the Pride of Britain awards or Long Lost Family.

Gaza, Epstein, ICE, Trump, the relentless platforming of the far right to the point of considering them to be quite acceptable competitors for primetime fun with Ant and Dec, the seedily amorous relationship between press and politicians, the desire to dig deep down and hide in a cave of your own making gets stronger every day.

I look online for nuclear bunkers that are up for sale.

Can you still socialise?

I’ve never been adept at that, but at places like The Laugharne Weekend where musicians, poets and writers gather, I could barely cross the threshold of the pub. I managed it once and then retreated to the sofa for Twenty Four Hours in A&E.

Walking is a necessity.

However much I want to stay under the duvet, I know I have to go and meet the sky. I was adept at solitude as a child. In late middle age, I have honed this skill almost to perfection.

I feel a resistance when it comes to events. Perhaps this is because my schedule is not as incessant as usual, the pauses allow the doubt to seep in.

It is harder to find those necessary buzzes. I am still writing poetry every day but again, the adrenaline kick of creativity is more elusive.

I can imagine the possibility of stopping.

Collaging is now on the list, perhaps the hope of a high from all that inhaled spray mount. One of them is being constructed from all the bookmarks I’ve been finding in my dad’s books. The base is made of pages from. Tarka the Otter and it will then be entirely obscured by the book marks and a small painting of my dad’s hand holding an olive wood cross on his death bed. The other is made of pages from recipe books then obscured by my mother’s handwritten recipe cards and gaudy illustrations of 1950s fine dining from Good Housekeeping, surrounding a poem I wrote about her final days when even fudge held no appeal for her anymore (and she LOVED fudge).

I am sued to rapid highs and lows. In the last few years, the highs greatly outnumbered the lows having psychotically and pharmaceutically dismantled my anxiety. It is now the relentless low hum of a David Lynch industrial soundtrack.

There is a glumness to the world, but I will refuse to accept defeat.

I will watch the buzzards.

I will chronicle the changes in the catkins by the canal and the thistle by the railway station.

I will take instinctual photographs of the angles of railway platforms, the staining on brick walls, the moon reflected into the water.

I will write and I will create in whatever way I can until I am on fire again.

On Saturday, I was in Folkestone.

I was sorry to miss the Together March in London (BBC estimate of attendees - 12) but this event on the beach was for libraries.

It was part of Creative Folkestone’s Folkestone is a library campaign to ensure a proper library for the town. When I was at the book festival 17 months before, I had suggested making a library on the beach. People could find their own patch and build a little sandcastle library where they could highlight their favourite books and the things they would love to have in a library. The idea was simplified as someone had to organise it. That’s the problem, I come up with ideas but I rely on other people working out how to actually do them. It became a book swap. For one hour on the beach, Folkestone would try to get the record for latest number of books swapped. The record was 591. I arrive at the beach after stopping off at Oxfam Books on the way. I pick up a beautifully illustrated books from the 1940s about what you need for a happy home. It is filled with images of women stirring pans, filling buckets, and wallpapering.

I meet Sophie at the beach. She is one of the minds that has led the way in this endeavour. There is that worried look, “will anyone turn up?”

They do. The book swap record is smashed by the children’s book swap era alone. Even better, strangers start talking to each other because books are there best social lubricant (and if they are not, I am in the wrong room).

Here are some poems written on the train to Folkestone.

Shelved

Sternly

You look at me

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”

And it’s about then that I can see

You shouldn’t be working in the library

———————————————————

Shared

You say

“You must read Gratitude!”

I see in your fervour

The excitement to share

The desire to make me feel

The love freshly imprinted on you

From the ink

The swirls of the words

The shattering understanding of suffering

But also of solidarity

And I say

“Have you read The Violent Bear it Away?”

I don’t reveal too much

But you can see the places I’ve been taken

By Flannery’s imagination

Then, we sit in silent conversation

Listening to our pages turn

The final satisfied sigh

As we both understand

You and I

Are most definitely

So happily

On the same page

Of literary camaraderie

————————————————-

No Shhhhh for the Revolution

If you want to be a revolutionary

You need to get to the library

Reading freely

Minds unfettered

A building to get lost in

A place to find yourself

The librarian can seem quiet

But inside beats a rebel heart

That will fight enthusiastically

For children and adults to see

Works some wish to declare “unsavoury”

Gay love. Black history.

Trans tales. Anything emancipatory.

They censor

Because they want to redact possibilities

Of alternative ways to build society.

Fight. Fight. Fight. For your library.

This is civilisation.

This is opportunity.

This is liberty.

Robin is on tour in the UK to a bookshop or library near you. Dates at robinince.com

We arrive just in time to rush around the charity shops.

It is 4.20pm.

Danger time for keen charity shop interrogators in small towns as many boutiques of the charitable and arcane close around 430pm.

We acknowledge this open until 5pm and skip by, knowing we have that extra room to look at the trinkets of the lost.

I find a large book of phenomenology that I purchase in the almost complete knowledge my intention to read it will not go beyond that. I also buy a copy of Virginia Giuffre’s book Nobody’s Girl. I already have a copy at home which I keep beginning until I reach the point of the soul and body crushing reality that far too many live in when abusers take hold. It has been one of the existential shocks of the twenty twenties just how many people are prepared to ignore or silence the words of raped and abused children and appease or even promote those who abuse them.

The final words of her foreword are “I am a warrior. A warrior with a story to tell”. Victims of power should not need to be warriors to be heard, to bring change, but they must be if they are to have even the tiniest chance of being heard. It is stories like these that made me realise I had no choice but to leave an institution that would rather pretend it had good manners than shake up the power system. As I have written about before, it was the BBC’s displeasure in me naming some of the rapists and abusers who have been very very close to the monarchy that made me say “no more” .

I have bought the book to read more and will then pass this copy on to someone else. It is a story that we must actively spread.

I am with Carly, who I first met when she was still a student filled with curiosity, she still is, and Joanna Neary who I first met in 2004 when we shared a venue at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. My show was rubbish, hers was rightly nominated for the Best Newcomer. On the train down, Joanna relentlessly sketched and draw, she is so full of creativity she can’t slow down. It is one of the many reasons we are pals (we are working on a book together at the moment and it is always a joy to see what dreams have made it to the page).

Joanna and I are performing a haphazard show at the Old Library in Bodmin.

It is full of friendly and inquisitive people and there are many delightful coincidences waiting for us.

The day before would have been Elizabeth Sladen’s 80th birthday. As someone for whom Doctor Who was a lifebelt keeping me afloat through childhood, I felt her part in my breathing should not go unmentioned, so I wrote this poem.

Anxious watchers just before our tea

The Doctor returning to Galiffrey

We knew the end must be near

now you’d defeated the hand of fear

He’s going to drop you home

Return you to the Greenwich time zone

You thought you wanted to go

But really you know

linear time is a boring place

Compared to time and relative dimension in space

“Till we meet again, Sarah”

Uh hmmm uh hmmm

And then

As the house key slides up the piano wire

Announcing the exit of the TARDIS

You look around and realise this

Is not Hillview Road

The doctor blew it

He blew it

you’ve experienced worse than failing to reach South Croydon

Zygons, Davros, Sutekh, Morbius, the Monster of Peladon

And so you whistle on

35 years gone

We’ve grown up now

Left our childish things behind?

But then we find

the news that you’ve died

at 65

Were we prepared for the feelings

As our past became so clearly present

World news

Perhaps galactic

So much more than just a sidekick

Would you have ever know of all the fuss

Rheumy eyed Tom later sums it up

“Poor us”

“Poor us”

In the interval, a man approaches me to say that he designed Sarah Jane’s sonic lipstick for the Sarah Jane Adventures.

I also told a story about a gig in the West Midlands where a man approached me and said “sorry if I have to leave during the show, it won’t be because I’m not enjoying it, but because I’ve currently got a prostate the size of a satsuma”. Turns out the man in the front row is from the West Midlands and he, too, currently has a prostate the size of a satsuma, but it has currently been tied down by some surgical system of cables or other.

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Before the gig began, as I drank my peppermint tea, an apology was made for the mismatched cup and saucer. I said that there were many hip cafes that I knew that worked very had to ensure no cup and saucer matched. I added that the Railway in Southend (now reopened as a gig venue) managed to have not one single chair that matched another.

At the end of the evening, as I’m signing books, a man tells me it is a long time since he last saw me.

Where?

Of course, the Railway in Southend.

Keep your mind open and your curiosity flowing and there are coincidences (synchronicity?) everywhere.

It is raining, so the trains have coughed to a stop.

Fortunately, Joanna has a fantastic friend who drives us to Redruth and I am put up by Kate who regularly provides me with a bed when I play Cornish gigs. I have know her since I was eight and she went to school with my sister. I am now an old man with a shiny head and a beard and she has barely changed at all.

How devious our genes can be.

The next morning, I visit the library with Joanna, promise a gig and find a heavy book I need in the library sale. It’s always a heavy book when I have eight more days on the road.

Redruth is a town that is often passed through, but not stopped in.

It is filled with history on the cusp of being forgotten, but it fascinates me. I like the walls and I like the sense that something is beginning too brew here again.

We go to the Beats and Roots cafe and sit in a beautifully decorated shed. A young woman pops her head in and asks if it is okay to sit in there too.

“This is a shed for EVERYONE!”

We get talking about her life and hopes and Jo tells her a little of what we do.

“I used to write poetry when I was a teenager, but I always got worried about the rhymes” she tells us.

“To hell with the rhymes!” We reply

We deport and say we will stay in contact and by the nighttime she has sent Joanna some of her poetry and they are in a creative discussion.

I find more books in the Oxfam, including some John Clare and Emily Dickinson, and also a bag of Brooke Bond tea cards that include dinosaurs, birds and fashions of Swinging London. They are irresistible partly because the first one I see is a warbler drawn by CF Tunnicliffe, my father’s favourite artist.

Joanna tells me to reject the train and take the bus to Falmouth. Unfortunately, this gives me just enough spare time to find the bookshop Needful Things which holds in its window many horror books by Crab King Guy N Smith. I leave with Neophyte, The Accursed and THROWBACK “primitive , pre human, they swarmed across the land”

And now to Falmouth.

Will the giant crabs be invading?

If you create a equation for intrigue per square yard, I think the result will show it is the most fascinating bookshop in the world.

It is probably the second smallest bookshop that I know.

The winner of smallest is the fabulous JE Books in Hepworth’s arcade, Hull. It is a matter of feet from Dinsdale’s Joke and Trick shop (founded 1930), so you have two mighty wonders seconds from each other.

But back to Bell Street before we go down a path of plastic fangs and joy buzzers.

One of the first times I visited Archive, en elderly customer was sat having a cup of tea while the bookseller darned his torn jacket.

It is a very hospitable place. You may well be offered a cup of tea and a biscuit if Tim is in. Tim owns the shop and plays the piano too. I have never been into the basement, but you can often hear music rising from it, sometimes Mozart, sometimes Cole Porter, and that is also where they keep the sheet music. It became a regular haunt as it is close to Marylebone station which is where I would take the train to visit my dad. I would pop to the bookshop before boarding the 15.40 as I felt I should always arrive at my father’s house bearing a book or two.

I would often find books by SPB Mais, a prolific but seemingly impoverished author who was also a schoolmaster.

He taught my dad and would sometimes sell him copies of his books. Every time I was told a story of him, he increasingly became Andrew Crocker Harris from Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version, cuckolded and in peril.

His second partner, he never divorced so couldn’t marry to Winifred Doughty , who, bored of living in penury, eloped with their mutual friend Dudley Carew. Carew wrote a cricket novel, Son of Grief, which was rated highly by John Arlott, who I rate highly too. You don’t have to a be cricket fan to enjoy his autobiography Basingstoke Boy, or his conversations with Mike Brearley as they drink vast amounts of wine on Alderney. Mais’s travel books are still interesting to read, especially as time capsules. If you are ever in Scarthin Books in Cromford, you’ll find a lot of Mais in the room by the cafe (Scarthin Books wins best Hommity pie).

The last time I visited Archive before seeing my dad, I wasn’t expecting to visit him that night so I had nothing for him. I had called about a Henry Williamson biography I was unsure if he possessed, but didn’t har back.

That night I was off to a book launch. I don’t often go to gatherings but Sarah Bakewell has been one of my favourite authors since reading her book on the pioneering essayist Montaigne. He argued for a cautious and questioning approach to knowledge and sometimes wore a medallion which said “sue sais-je?” - what do I know? Clearly, he would not be an ideal guest for Question Time or any other dogmatist’s paradise.

Taking a circuitous route to the legendary bookshop off the Kings Road, John Sandoe Books (set 1957), I went into Archive and found far too much, including Chandler’s The Big Sleep with a wonderfully lurid orchid and homicide cover.

I was embrassingly overloaded by the time I got to the complimentary wine and speeches, and lumbered around weighed down by wonders. Then, I received a message from eldest sister, dad was at Stoke Mandeville hospital.

Still ludicrously laden, I took Chiltern line to Stoke Mandeville and sat in a corridor where a nurse collapsed, and medical staff talked of how the system was broken . A confused elderly woman screamed, desperate to escape her trolley. By 3am, dad began to drift off and I sat next to him, reading Raymond Chandler. The cover was created by Tom Adams, who also painted some fabulous covers for Agatha Christie paperbacks which ventured towards voodoo and the strange. I had not been aware of his name until that night. Going back to my dad’s house once he was in a ward, one of the first things I found was his copy of Christie’s The ABC Murders, with a Tom Adams cover. The spell of Archive is always there.

On this week’s visit I picked up a copy of Picture Post from 1955 as it was it’s first 3D edition and the red and green lensed glasses were intact , allowing me to experience Terry-Thomas caddishly re-enacting the English Civil war and coming right at me. The rest of the 3D technology was reserved for adverts for the 4 cylinder Vauxhall Wyvern and Esso Extra “the finest petrol in the world”.

Tim commented that Sabrina, the voluptuous cover star of the magazine, had similarities to the the fantasy woman of Dennis Potter’s Lipstick on Your Collar and immediately found a copy of the teleplay to demonstrate the truthfulness of his comment. That morning, I had written a poem about Dennis Potter. As I said, the magic of Archive, the unlikeliness of leaving the shop without at leats one coincident occurring.

I struck up a conversation with Jonathan, a music therapist with the face of 1950s cyclist. We had met before in the shop and spoke of the delights. This was fortunate, because this meant I was close to the miscellaneous antiquarian books and noticed Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them. This is a book mentioned by Derek Jarman in Modern Nature. He was presented it by his parents the he was just four years old and I have been lucky enough to hold that copy in my hand while visiting Dungeness. I had been hunting for it for a while for my friend Melinda (and associate producer of Cosmic Shambles) a few years back and eventually found a copy. She was delighted. A few weeks later , her house flooded. Obviously, I did not ask if the dog had drowned or the electrics exploded, but went straight to, “the water didn’t rise to level of the shelf with Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow them did it?”

I was relieved to find out it was high enough to avoid the tide.

I also walked away with Rita Mae Brown’s A Plain Brown Rapper and the paperback of Angela Carter’s Collected Short Stories, which I am sure I have in another form, but it is always useful to have a travel copy.

There is no counter or till. Just a place by the door where books continue to spill. Today, Tim is assisted by a young bookbinder who looks carefully at the Beautiful Flowers and tells me who he believes must have bound it. He believes I have a bargain.

A few years back, I found a first edition of Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. It was £35. Tim was worried it was overpriced and, though I said I’m sure it wasn’t, he said, “we’ll look it up”.

He told me if it was overpriced then he would reduce it and if it was underpriced he would still sell it for £35.

That is the kind of shop Archive is.

It is a rare place and a wonder.

Robin’s tour dates are here including Belfast this Friday night and An Uncanny Hour with Mark Gatiss in London on Jan 31st.

‘The central fact of his life was that his mother died young’

The central fact of his life.

The central fact of my life is that my mother is dead.

I am Charcot’s hysteric: if you must know, my mother is dead” - Kate Zambreno, Book of Mutter.

I want to write a book about my mother.

It is only in the last few years that I have been confronted by the knowledge that there was another mother, but she became impossible to reach after 17th February 1972.

I have come to know, how little I know.

I need to find the clues to her, work out the path to the woman I didn’t know.

They are found in her letters as she traveled with my father through Ghana on one track roads that permitted you to travel in a specific direction depending on the day. North on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, South on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. No space to reverse, stick to the rules.

They took her to little towns.

She was unimpressed by the white men in them.

She described them as the sort of colonial drunks you might find in the background of a Graham Greene novel.

I remember when I found and read those letters that I thought I didn’t know this person because she had become a mother and, perhaps, in the act of becoming a mother, we had not been able to see who she was or had been beyond that. This may have been part of the story, but there was another part.

There were two men who did impress her, her dad and my dad, her husband.

She adored her father.

He had a Clark Gable moustache and a wave in his hair. He drank too much and smoked too much, but then gave it all up.

Too late, the damage was done, and he died when she was a teenager.

Her heart was broken.

She never stopped believing in God, because there had to be an afterlife where she would meet him again.

There were two men who did impress her, her dad and my dad, her husband.

She adored her father.

He had a Clark Gable moustache and a wave in his hair. He drank too much and smoked too much, but then gave it all up.

Too late, the damage was done, and he died when she was a teenager.

Her heart was broken.

She never stopped believing in God, because there had to be an afterlife where she would meet him again.

Her mother was Sybil, or Bill, or Morny to us, a nickname that had no grand story behind it as Nana nicknames so often don’t. My eldest sister would toddle in and say “Good Morny” and that is that origin story. She never forgave our dad for taking her daughter away.

She lived alone in 15, Broadfield Court, a maisonette in Bushy Heath. Bill Oddie was said to live near there and apparently one his children was a tearaway and brought trouble around the back of the bus garage.

Morny had two sisters. Mary or Mere or GingGing (origin stories unknown) had been married to a doctor. He died in his armchair after watching a county cricket match. I never knew him, but his name would come up whenever talk of the perfect peaceful death came up “cricket, a pint, falling asleep by the fire”. It would also come up if a Charlotte Rampling movie was on the telly as he had delivered her on 5th February 1946 in a village near Haverhill.

Morny’s other sister was Edith, the youngest and the sweetest. Her husband drowned (I think) and she lived alone in Truro and volunteered at Truro Cathedral. While the other two corrected their accents to be a little more BBC, Edith didn’t, and I fear they wish she had.

My mum was born on the eve of World War Two, September 1939, but played no part in causing it.

Being a 1950s teen, her scrapbooks were full of cuttings of Audrey Hepburn and Air Hostesses. She would happily have been either. Seventeen when Rock n Roll began to pollute the youth, she never screamed for Cliff. Her sole acknowledgment of Rock was an EP of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock.

At 19 years old, she married my father, nearly ten years older than her and always well turned out. When he died, we looked through the many photographs of his youth and saw no clue to any love before Pamela (oh, I forgot to tell you her name, Pamela Mary Horobin). She looked so full of joy on the steps of the church, a smile she would be robbed of on 17th February, 1972.

The snap of her at Stonehenge, you could touch the stones in those days without a druid’s licence, shows that smile again.

That smile again on visit to the Penthouse Club, don’t frown, such things were usual then on business trips. Dad brought home a copy of the magazine signed by the Pet of the Month (okay, frown a little) and I brought it out in the pulpit during his eulogy.

Mum really did want to be a “housewife”. Whenever we watched Wendy Craig in Butterflies we’d see her on the screen.

She had worked at MCA, the artists’ agency, and she would love to tell you of how Cary Grant would walk into the typing pool and say, “hello ladies”, and his charm would melt them all.

She talked of the confusion one day when there was a tramp in the lift, but that tramp was Alec Guinness preparing for The Horse’s Mouth, the story of an artist called Gully Jimson. We watched it often on rainy Saturday afternoons.

And then, 17th February 1972…

A short drive home, three miles at most, in the early Winter dark.

Always happy after horse riding (not me, I grew up to be too nervous to sit on a horse), I can only imagine she and Sarah were eager for their tea, maybe laughing and planning the next trip to borrow a horse for an hour from the Bagnalls.

A car speeding, overtaking, ploughs into us.

At home, my eldest sister, Camilla, is waiting for Top of the Pops. The police come knocking at the door.

Dad reassures that it is nothing much.

I still have my third birthday party on 20th February, while mum is in a coma.

When Morny sees her in the bed, she tells my dad that he thinks it would have been better if she hadn’t survived.

It was so often about appearances.

Dad, I’ll call him Nigel now, knew she was not better off dead.

Years later, a doctor sees her brain scan and is shocked that she survived and lived a life.

I’ll write no more as I have been through this before in Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal.

Though I will repeat the words that somehow, somehow, she “pulled herself together”. And I don’t mean in that sneery “oh pull yourself together” way, I mean in the kind of act of strength that exists in myths.

I meet the Rowlands outside St Andrew’s and St Cuthman’s church in Steyning. They knew my mother before and after, preached in the village where I was born. I thank them fort the help that they gave to my family after the accident. I mention that I knew my mother was changed.

Their faces drop, so little to say and so much, and in that expression, I knew how Pamela Mary Ince was lost that night and how she loved her life fighting to return and retain what she had been.

FUDGE

The fudge in the window
Was spur for a memory
Cut cubes showing off behind glass
Wasps dipping and licking
Wings flicking sugar
Once a must
But no need to pick up today
Last time we bought you a bag
They slumped in their paper
To the left of your chair
Lumped back
Into a single candy mass

In the sunlight you avoided
Never forgetful over treats
You barely touched them
The bag still full when you were gone
No purchase needed
But I’ll browse in memoriam
Maybe a quarter of vanilla
Shame to leave empty handed

Empty mouthed
Empty hearted

For Robin’s tour dates head to robinince.com including An Uncanny Hour LIVE in London with Mark Gatiss, David McAlmont and Alice Lowe.

As I was about to put my next post up, the news of the murder of Renee Good was broadcast. There will be many people writing on this, so I will merely say that it is another stinking example of the wretched and brutal criminal land that the diseased minds of the Trump administration are proud to have created. These are cruel and greedy people devoid of compassion, waiting for their pep mills so they can awkwardly entrap another child and destroy another future.

For the purposes of this short piece, I just want to focus on one of the ways the syphilitic mouths of Fox News decide to debase a woman murdered at point blank range by a man officially employed by his government for his thuggery.

The host sneered that Renee was a “self proclaimed poet” in much the same way a Spectator hack would call someone a “so called comedian”. That the lead propaganda to defame a victim would include the disdain that their mind, freshly eviscerated by savage bullets, would have considered poetry to be an aspiration, says a great deal.

It is a further explanation of why artists will steer clear of the Trump-Kennedy Centre, though I presume it will now be almost perpetually occupied by Kevin Sorbo doing Hercules on Ice.

The hatred of imagination, creativity and beauty is typical of those that espouse dogma and dictatorship. It reminds me of the children in Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin. Living in the wheat belt of America, if ever they find something beautiful they decide that they must smash it. Those who cannot commit to wonder and curiosity, choose to destroy the marvellous. Their failure to be able to see beauty means they must destroy it and replace it with a golden toilet.

As I have become more deeply fascinated by poetry and poets, I have found the incredible power that pulses within and between the lines. As I mentioned in my piece about my Monkey Cage resignation, poets like Audre Lorde and Alexis Pauline Gumbs played a part in emboldening me, in seeing new possibilities. Alexis describes herself as a “black feminist love evangelist” and when you read her you are ignited.

I think of Salena Goden too whose work Pessimism is for Lightweights also refuses to allow you to fall into cynicism and surrender.

When Fox News excreted their disdain, I thought of all of those who have been mocked for their sincerity and their empathy and their ambition to increase love within the world.

Since I started writing poetry, I have found it has changed my relationship with the world.

I encourage anyone who has the slightest desire to write poetry to just start writing poetry.

Do not listen to the teacher in your head.

Banish the cynical voice of those whose days are only made complete by mockery.

Do not get caught up in the tedious discussion of “but is it really poetry”.

It is poetry if you call it a poem, of someone else sees it as poem, even better. Do not start by thinking “how do I write poetry?”, start by thinking. “What do I want to write?”

If someone smiles or cries, feels less alone or more enthused, when you read it out aloud you have made something wonderful. If it has helped you or changed you, and you decide to keep it in a drawer, you have still made something wonderful. But if you can, dare to share it. Know that those who seek to find fault are not people who want to hear. Those who approach you wanting to improve with open hearted interest are the ones you want to find.

Know that by speaking up, you might make someone else free.

When I watch Grace Petrie or Josie Long or Andrea Gibson, I see those faces that are being given new bravery to be who they really are.

Today, let us write poetry for Renee, for her partner, for her children, for all of those we know are a little more scared to be in the world today, let’s throw our words around them.

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First, written in anger

Media Notes to Justify an Orphan Maker

Do not be quick to put the boot in

Those accused of shooting

A peaceful mother in the face

(three times)

Her demise may well be justified

Our population now is radicalised

(have you noticed how women often fail

To even obey the voices of the male?)

And this was no run of the mill “mum”

She was a deviant one

A lesbian

And we cannot dismiss

How the sapphic can put men with pistols

Into a panic

She may not have committed the sin of being brown

But her profile page declared a pronoun!

A typical trait

of an enemy of the state

But wait

A little more

She called herself a “poet” too

And women like that are often shrews

To take language and create a rhythm

Another clue to domestic terrorism

So I say again

From autocue to you

The world is surely a better place

If we shoot love and peace and protest in the face

Now, written impassioned and ignited

From this Ash

If you are a “self proclaimed poet”

It is important that you know that

The USA is not always the place to be

If writing verse that’s free

You may be eyed suspiciously

They may sneer at your creativity

“Does it make proper money…

…like the arm industry”

But know those voices who only see the money deal

Will never find a way to feel

The beauty and the power

The rebellion and the revolution

Of Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni

Walt Whitman and Andrea Gibson

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

They heard those hollow hearts around them

Knew the damage they would do

With their deadly dull dull beats

That imitate a life

And instead, chose unfettered imagination

Rejection of presumptions

Where the limit of your life is the colour of your skin

Or the clothes that you are put in

They threaten the system of control say “no!”

To your expectations

See through your pathetic frame

Your manly girdle and those blue pills

Which aim to inflate your ersatz genitalia

And in the anger of your impotence

You’ll burn the library down

Not knowing that the ashes will fertilise the soil

They will shout at the beauty

Infuriated by the rainbows

Cut their fingers as their tear at the roots

And those bloodless hands will shrivel

Scream at the unfairness of justice

Finally served

All because the “self proclaimed poet”

Dared to proclaim

Dared to tell us

“Take your mind

And take your pen

And poison the monsters

With love that will choke them”

For upcoming tour dates check out robinince.com

STEWART LEE!

TOO LONG!

This either means that it should have been shorter, after all, Alan Bennett’s favourite stand up knows a thing or two about words and how to use them,

OR

It means that actually it wasn’t nearly long enough.

Had it been five or six hours with perpetual loops of the same sentence, Stewart may have considered it a resignation speech worked through the philosophies of John Cage. Sadly, I had chosen to make it just long enough to be too long but not so long it could be art.

A week later Stewart took his mock revenge on me for taking up too much of his time, and did a parody of my resignation speech on stage at the Nine Lessons show on Thursday evening. It was his resignation from the Nine Lessons shows because he felt our failure to acknowledge his beliefs in Bigfoot were no longer tenable. It was very funny, but a little too soon for me, and it caused a bit of a downward spiral. This was not Stewart’s fault, this was just the internal battles I was having getting used to the bridge I had put a match to.

I wrote many statements after I resigned in September.

I saw visions of what would happen at the end of that final episode.

In times of intense delusion, I would see my departure being directed by Frank Capra.

It was a difficult few months, especially when the Director General of the BBC resigned and part of story was that the BBC was not critical enough of the trans community and far too left wing and progressive.

That whole story was topsy turvy to me (as was the extraordinary bias on the reporting of the Sandie Peggie case by the majority of news outlets). Having two months to think about why you have resigned before you publicly resign was an enervating experience, though I rarely doubted my decision. Everything that happened over the previous five years that led to this had a habit of rearing up as malevolent ghosts.

Similarly, since the final episode went out on Christmas Day, much has continued to churn within me. The hardest part was every time that a family or individual came up to me after a show and a talk and said, “Never stop making The Infinite Monkey Cage, we all love it”.

I would nod, even though I knew it would soon be over for me.

After the resignation became public, I was fully aware that the rabid anti trans preachers in particular would pour out their hot saliva over the story. It has been the usual dismal carnival of abuse, crack-pottery and cruelty from this despicable cult, mixed up with lies and conjecture..

They claw at their cognitive dissonance like Roderick Usher trying to support the beams of his crumbling house.

I was also intrigued by the BBC’s stock reply to anyone who complained that I felt I had no choice but to resign.

“All BBC staff and freelancers are expected to respect civility in public discourse and not bring the BBC into disrepute”.

I think I am surprisingly civil on social media considering the viciousness and lies that I’ve experienced on social media in the last five years. People getting in contact with authors to say they shouldn’t work with me as I “hate women” (ie I must hate women as I do not agree with dehumanising trans women), that I am “a rape apologist” , “rape promoter” and even worse, amongst the usual threats of violence.

The relentless slur that I hated women ironically began because I attempted to stand up for four cis women, all whom have had numerous attacks on them throughout their career for standing up for women’s rights. Each had committed the cardinal sin of offering support for the trans community and so were fair game. A further irony is that this hate towards them was stirred up by a man.

I remain incredibly disappointed that I felt that I could not continue the show and who knows where new freedom will take me, perhaps to a sunny field that actually leads to the abattoir. I remain full of ideas and keep meeting people whose work I want to share with as many people as possible.

At the end of our recording at the NIA theatre, as the other guests and Brian Cox left the stage, I stood up. Our wonderful producer stood up to thank the audience, but I told her that I needed to say something and it might be best to keep distant as I didn’t want anyone implicated in something I had kept secret from everyone. I can’t remember the last time I shook so much when standing before an audience. I felt intensely emotional. As we finished the recording, my mind was still questioning whether I could do this, or just make it all easy and leave the stage for the final time with no one knowing they would never see me at a Monkey Cage again.

I had my three pages pf A4 in my back pocket, but wasn’t going to read it out verbatim. I have rarely followed the faintest semblance of a script for over 200 episodes, why start now?

At the end, I walked straight off and sat alone in a stairwell, eyes wet and in need of darkness.

My pal Zena later told me she wished I’d stayed for a moment as there was a standing ovation and many people were in tears.

I have felt empowered by so many of the messages I have received since.

A couple of years ago, I could not have taken such a bold, possibly foolish, action. Understanding my mind and how it works has done a great deal for my courage.

Jamie + Lion changed me by explaining my neurodivergent mind. There are others who played a part in giving me courage - Lucia Osborne Crowley, whose work on bringing Epstein and the culture of abuse into the light has been so important.

Poets like Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Salena Goden have similarly been vital voices, as well as artists such as Josie Long and Jen Brister.

There will be new projects and tours (Cambridge, Belfast, London and Cornwall all coming up this month) and such through The Cosmic Shambles Network as ever, so follow them (Instagram and BlueSky and YouTube) and me (Instagram and BlueSky) to keep up to date, and you can always sign up to our Patreon to support as well.

Below is the statement I put out on my socials after the final recording in case you’ve not read it.

________

The combination of touring the book in libraries and bookshops, finishing the book of poetry that is due out in Autumn, making a new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage, starting to take The Universe and the Neurodiverse out on the road, and writing a book on The Future of Jokes, has left me with a very limited bandwidth. (It sounds like quite a lot when I put it like that).

Still, if I do have an hour of downtime I berate myself for either using it lazily or not at all.

Let’s work backwards for now.

I am currently on a train to Hastings, but began the day in Bradford Upon Avon with my friend Stephen Volk who is the author of one of my favourite novellas, Whitstable. It is a fictionalised story of Peter Cushing set shortly after the death of his wife , Helen. As Cushing admirers might know, he was in utter despair when his wife died. His first reaction was to repeatedly run up and down the stairs in the hope of bringing on a heart attack so he good join Helen in heaven. Stephen’s story shows us a man fallen who is brought back from the brink when a child approaches him and asks for help as his stepfather is a vampire.

On Saturday evening, I played The Pound in Corsham and began by showing off my latest purchases from the day’s books hoping which included a 1947 volume from the Gas Council about the exciting future of gas and its many appliances, told by the Whiskey Galore author, Compton Mackenzie. Happy me.

Often, there are teenagers at the gigs and it is a lovely thing when they approach me and say, “I didn’t get all the references , but I get the way your mind works”. Reminds me of the builder who came up to me and said, “I didn’t understand a word of that…and I’ve had a lovely time”.

I love performing at the moment. I know it is chaos and I know it may seem strange, but I think it connects. I watched a documentary about King Crimson a few years ago, and Robert Fripp talked of always aiming for every gig for as many people in the audience as possible. I now this may sound hifalutin, but I really hope the intensity of my shows can create something that may assist at least some in the audience the possibility of walking unafraid or, at least, less afraid.

At Corsham, I meet Ursula Martin who is often walking great distances.

Her most recent book is One Woman Walks Across Europe. She is currently walking from Lands End to John O Groats stopping at as many independent bookshops as she can along the way. Today, she was at the lovely Corsham Bookshop. I ask her if she would like me to join her on some of the hike and hopefully we will yomp into a few independent bookshops in September and October.

On Friday, I wake up near Melrose in Scotland and have breakfast with Mollie Hughes, Jen Stout and MICHAEL PALIN. Over fruits of the forest and sausages, Michael insists on showing us short films he has made across Europe where he attacked dogs with bamboo sticks, in particular labradoodles, and the tells us that we must squeeze his right arm which has recently gone septic due to using cheap ink in his tattoo of Elaine Paige.

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Oh okay, no he doesn’t, he talks warmly of his travels, in particular across Nepal and Venezuela while taking a deep interest in others travels .

(In truth, MOLLIE and JEN deserve capitals too).

I stayed up too late the night before and so I gently eat yoghurt. I am fortunate that the return train journey which will ultimately take me to Bath Spa is quite enough for me to have space to ponder and reader Stu Hennigan’s viciously vivid novel, Keshed (it etches itself on your organs).

Arriving in Bath, I see a sharp increase in stalls selling pink stetsons - Robbie Williams is in town.

I avoid bookshops and walk through the alleys of Bath, though still drop into to Mr Bs to sign a few books and, as ever, leave an odd message above the signature. Arriving at Rondo Theatre, I see that Beaufort Books is open.

Uh oh.

I find a book of photographs that With Stephen the souls of those that sat, a Moomins book and a nice hardback of Krapp’s Last Tape, plus an edition of Wide Sargasso Sea that I didn’t own. During the show, I give away the Sargasso Sea as I would rather it was read than hoarded.

I talk eels for a while, a Sargasso anecdote.

I sit outside The Village, a new and welcoming bar on the edge of Bath, with Stephen, Patricia and John. Being called the village allows us, by which I mean ME, to keep doing impersonations of Patrick McGoohan. We see if our ears are strong enough to hear Rock DJ, but Robbie has thinned to nothing where we are. Then, the rain drops grow round and bash us, and we depart.

Order signed copies of Normally Weird here. Get the Normally Weird EP here. Check out Robin’s tour dates here.

I meet Andrew, architect turned physicist, at Newcastle station.

When I am joined for short legs of my tour, I am reminded how blessed I am to live this eccentric life of bookshop and library touring. Whereas I am used to two or three destinations a day, most people are on the same route every day.

Walking from Corbridge station, I am captivated by the flowers growing from a Fram wall and the crows haunting a tractor. Men toil in the fields as if they have escaped from a Ladybird book illustration (on the return, they have gone. Have they been sucked into a 1968 copy of The How and Why Book of Ploughing and Harvesting?)

Forum Books is a former chapel. The bookshelves are pews. When doing talks, you stand in a mighty pulpit. Beneath you is a fully bodily immersive christening pool. I believe Ann Cleves may have placed a body and a mystery in it at one time.

Plenty of time before Hexham, so Andrew and I eat chips in the pub.

I am captivated by more flowers growing in the cracks as we return to the station. Andrew starts to get used to me fidgety fascination with the angles of iron and the patterns of rust.

We pop into Cogito books who will be the booksellers for the night. During the times around lockdown, they would ride their bicycles across farmland to deliver books and medication (obviously I know that books are medication, but Catch 22 doesn’t always have the same effect on arthritis as prescription pills, though I’ve heard Jilly Cooper’s Rivals once cured erectile dysfunction and Polo does wonders for colic).

Walking towards the arch by the Hexham Sweetie Jar, Andrew points out that it is set within the last masonry of St Mary’s Church.

I am meeting Kathryn Mannix for tea. We met briefly at Durham Book Festival when her first book, With the End in Mind, was published. She is a former doctor with important and compassionate views on dealing with death and the grief that follows. Her book, Listen, starts with her as a Junior Doctor being punched in the face by a woman who has just been told her husband has died. I am not sure how common this reaction is, but I met a man who told me that when a policeman came to his door to tell him that his wife had died in car crash he also punched the news giver in the face. My simplistic psychiatric understanding this is that our refusal to believe this terrible event has happened means we try to silence the speaker. Without the words, we can pretend, however feebly, that this truth is a lie.

Arriving at the venue, I apologise to Henry who will be my interviewer. This is my first event with interrogation and I know I am as bad or as good) as Slavoj Zizek or Alan Moore in terms of requiring very few questions.

I end the night with David, a fount of knowledge when it comes to railways issues, who I first got to know when he gave me advice on attempting to get to Whitley Bay after a storm. I am also accompanied by another member of the audience (apologies for forgetting your name) and her dog, who is excitably chasing an imaginary fly. I admire the moon as I walk up the hill to my hotel.

I start early for Edinburgh. As well as my two official events, a signing at Portobello Books and a talk for Toppings, I want to make impromptu visits to Lighthouse Books and The Edinburgh Bookshop. Edinburgh is truly spoilt when it comes to magnificent bookshops.

I am good, and shun most of the charity shops.

Eyeing up The Lighthouse window before entry, I see what looks like a brilliant book cover, a UFO projecting out a rainbow which engulfs two women embracing. I am sad to discover it is a greetings card, but happily buy to give to my pal, Jo. I also see an interesting, Culture is Bad for You, which chronicles cultures failure to enhance, encourage and include diverse voices. I turn it round and see blurb from Josie Long, so I must buy that too.

It is a shop full of activist energy, kind people erupting with rebellious spirit. I will be spending a lot of time here during this year’s fringe.

Above the shelves is cardboard placard “Bookselling is not a crime. Solidarity with the educational bookshop Jerusalem. #booksellingisnotacrime’

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Then, on across The Meadows to The Edinburgh Bookshop, now moved and with more neon and the exotic jungle of a children’s section to climb vines into Gruffalos and Toads.

And so the seaside and Portobello Books, where I meet Jo and sign a few books for the usual sort of lovely person who haunts such book palaces. I am lured by counter books - Fusion From Alice Coltrane to Moor Mother by Alex Coles and In the Good Seats: Essays on Film. I also choose a display of books to be my author’s choice section for a week or two. These include Lucia Osborne Crowley’s The Lasting Harm (we will be talking together about each other’s books at The Free University of Glastonbury on the Saturday of the festival). Ellen Jones’s Outrage and a book of Moomin cartoon strips.

I am talking in a church for Toppings with my friend Lee Randall. She is a very reliable bibliophile and her recommendations are always excellent (another of my Portobello recommendations was Camilla Grudova’s Children of Paradise - an author I was lured to by Lee). For the last few years, I have been on the hunt for Perry Mason books for Lee as she has almost all of them, but a few remain elusive. Erle Stanley Gardner appears to be even more prolific than Simenon, maybe his gambling debts were even bigger.

Those still outstanding are The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom (1949),The Case of the Shapely Shadow (1960), The Case of the Horrified Heirs (1964, The Case of the Troubled Trustee (1965) and The Case of the Postponed Murder (1973). Another bibliophile pal, Elaine, has also come down from Inverness for the event, so recommendations fly.

After the event, Jo, Lee, Elaine and me and assembled members of the choir Jo sings with retire to the Regent Bar, one of Edinburgh’s friendliest and famed LGBT bars. We drag some of Toppings with us too. I sit and drink and talk too much, while having origami dinosaurs made for me.

At the bus stop, we get into conversation with a worried woman who has stayed too late at the bingo and is worried her bus card won’t work so late at night. The problem was, just as she was about to leave, a Johnny Cash tribute act began, and she loves Ghost Riders in the Sky, so her fate was sealed. She tells us all about her life and we tell he we’ll pay her bus fare, and so we do.

Written while listening to Tender Buttons by Broadcast and Live at The Annandale by Life Without Buildings

Robin’s next tour dates are here and you can buy a signed copy of his new book here.

Finding myself at a loose end for 35 minutes at Marylebone station, I walk towards Bell Street and the Archive Bookstore. It is an Alladin’s Cave, a curate’s egg and the perfect opening for an Edwardian tale of a musty academic coming upon an old tome that unleashes satanic forces. It was the last bookshop I browsed in before I received the message that my father had gone to hospital for what would be his final time. I often found books for him here, in particular the books of SPB Mais who had been his school teacher and obviously had an effect on him. As a perpetually in debt teacher, he would sometimes sell copies of his books to my dad at a knockdown price. On that occasion, I found myself changing my destination to Stoke Mandeville with a copy of The Big Sleep ly in my hand. It had the most vivid cover of death among the orchids. I sat reading it in the hospital corridor as I sat with my father, who was sliding in and out of confused dreams. Popping back to his house once he was in a ward, I saw an Agatha Christie in his bedroom with a splendid cover. It was The ABC Murders, he had worked for the ABC travel guide company, hence his interest. Looking for the information on the cover artist, I discovered it was Tom Adams, who also designed the orchid and death image on The Big Sleep.

When I visited Archive for the first time, the bookseller was sat sewing the jacket of a regular. It was an act of benevolence that immediately made me fond of the shop.

It is a small space, made tighter by boxes of books, ephemera and sheet music (one of their specialities). You may walk in and find the sound of the piano rising up the stairs as the owner sometimes retreats downstairs to play a while.

Once, I found a first edition of Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. At the counter, the owner perused it and said he was not sure if he was overcharging at that price (and it was very reasonable anyway) and that he would look it up online. Should it be going for more, he would not up the price, should it be going for less, he would knock a few quid off.

Part of the enchantment of the shop is that many customers are seeking something fascinating, they are on a quest, perhaps for a lost Ivor Novello song or, in my case, Ernest Thesiger’s Practically True.

I am also on the look for Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books as my pal Lee has nearly all of them, but there are still five that are concealing themselves.

Today, I had my big case and rucksack, so navigation was even tighter than usual. It was here that I bought a copy of The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, once owned by Dennis Nordern. I also took away his copy of Dickie Henderson’s autobiography. Dickie Henderson was a huge star, a supreme talent - song, dance and comedy - yet on his death he seemed to be almost instantaneously forgotten.

I have spent night’s with my Levenshulme pal, Carl, watching old footage of his doing his drunk singing Set Em Up, Joe act and I am determined to restore his reputation.

Today, I leave with a biography of Eartha Kitt written by her daughter, a first edition of Jean Stein’s documentary biography of Edie Sedgwick, and a 1953 edition of Jean Paul Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis - “it’s quite rare but this is a tatty copy”.

This is a secondhand bookshop as they were and as they can still be.

Next time your train is delayed at Marylebone, take a walk there.

Robin’s next tour dates are here and you can buy a signed copy of his new book here.

My destination is Mostly Books. They had warned me that being midweek on a sunny day it might be quiet, but that is of no concern. Just as I am happy to play bookshops that only fit an audience of nine, I am happy to just pop in and say hello. I sign a few books for customers and chat awhile, then meet the bookshop dog.

I love dogs. They were so much part of family life as I grew up and now I love them because they are the perfect partner when avoiding human contact at hectic house parties.

I pop to the next door Oxfam and I am immediately drawn to the heaviest books - the first eleven issues of a magazine called Arts and Artists from the 1960s, littered with pop art and experimentalism, it must be mine.

I tell the manager they may well see me again as I have also eyed up two bound collections of Sight and Sound which include articles by Susan Sontag on Ingmar Bergman, just my sort of monochromatic melancholy psychiatric delight. I go into the bookshop office for my interview with BBC Scotland and wait a while and then realise it is not until tomorrow.

This gives me enough time to return to Oxfam for those heavy heavy Sight and Sound (physically and psychologically).

I wait for my sister in the market square on the happy to chat bench that circles a tree - “sit here if you don’t mind someone stopping to say hello”.

In Oxford, I seek the Tolkien bench where I am meeting a photographer for the one bit of media attention Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal has, an interview in The Times (I fear the deeply unhelpful Age of Diagnosis has lapped up all the neurodivergent book attention - the progressive will always get less space than the progressive - I think of the Clive James poem “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered and I am Glad”)

The moment Sarah arrives I know we will get on she - she is vibrating in the world at a similar speed to me, so we bubble with ideas involving cowslips, precarious trees and dandelions, but first we grew that we better get the more boring photograph that will most likely get used in the can.

Then we yomp into the woods. Josie from Pan Macmillan gets called in to aid with light reflection and yomps through the brambles, while my sister goes off in search of dandelions ready for blowing. Sarah is the perfect photographer for me, fireworks of the mind collide.

In the midst of dispersing dandelion seeds, Josie reminds us that I also have to go to Blackwells to talk. I collide with pals on the way to get coffee and they tell me I am on in 5 minutes so they generously take over my coffee order and add indulgent cakes.

It is a lovely mix of people as ever, including a ten year old autistic lad who has wonderfully eager questions and late diagnosed autistic women who pulse with the new power of understanding (not a label - a road map, a user’s manual for our mind).

A drink in the pub and talk of blacksmithing, then back to the house I was born in.

Haddenham Community Library is the first destination. Today is the official publication day of Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal and a community library seems a lovely location to officially start the race.

I have an interview with BBC Scotland at 2pm so tell the audience that there will be a hard out the moment my phone rings , but I will return for questions.

At 2pm, the phone rings and I wander outside and start the interrogation live from Glasgow. The Book House from Thame has come to be the bookseller, and as I stand in the half shade, a few people cheerily depart with signed , books in hand and we wave at each other. Most have remained, so at 2.25 I return to the shelves, “now where were we?”

Of all the book tours I have done, this is the one with the most audience questions, sometimes sad questions, sometimes happy comments, often, just curiosity thriving. The pillar of the library is full of enthusiasm and stories, and we talk of the importance of literacy projects inside prisons. Many people in prison have limited literacy and may also be neurodivergent.

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My friend Alistair has worked in prisons for many years, creating fabulous projects that give those inside new possibilities. He was handily diagnosed with dyslexia just after he left school. The diagnosis immediately gave him an understanding of why there were certain things he found more difficult and how this was not due to “stupidity”, just the way his mind work. Then he began a life of being an autodidact. His novel The Sentence was written without punctuation and using only monosyllabic words because he had discovered the issues inmates had with reading. It is like reading a brilliant spell and I have participated in a live reading of it that spun the minds of readers and audience. This especially came to the fore when audience members got up to go to the bar or toilets, as individual readers would be pointed at and told to follow them and continue the reading beyond the confines of the stage.I nearly walked right into the cubicle with one of the audience members.

When I visited a prison with Alistair, one off the inmates was desperate to read me a poem he had written.The pride in his eyes that he now had a new tool to navigate the world was clear to see in his eyes. Alistair’s latest work is a collection of his experimental fiction - Songs of Insolence and Exoedience - the cover is something to behold - almost Lovecraft and Hardy, what a dangerous double act - “why don’t you do something to HAUNT me?”

My sister and I pop into the bricks and mortar bookshop of Thame to see their finely preserved puffing which was apparently a star of The Repair Shop . I am jovial as ever when I bound into the bookshop. One of the booksellers eyes me suspiciously, the other other is very friendly.

Ah, the old good bibliophile bad bibliophile psychological hustle.

I buy a big art book in the Oxfam Bookshop based around Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Maybe there are enough pictures for me to finally read it.

Publication day ends at Hungerford Bookshop, this time in the town hall rather than the parish hall, probably a good thing as ;last time the Brownies overran with their knot making workshop.

Current reading

Monumenta by Lara Haworth

The Bona Book of Julian and Sandy by Barry Took and Marty Feldman

Written while listening to

Pinky’s Dream by David Lynch

Vertigo by Bernard Herrman

Robin’s next tour dates are here and you can buy a signed copy of his new book here.

Tring, two stops on, is a considerable distance from the town centre which promises dressed fleas in its natural history museum. The museum also has many many dogs, it is Baskervillian in its possible hauntings.

It is a bright day, so even the more brutal corners of the concrete shopping promenade have their dread washed away. A thin stretch of park is in full Spring and looks like a 1960s postcard where the colorising machine has been turned up to full, Powell and Pressburger could live here.

Hemel Hempstead is not the first library of the year, but the first officially on my Normally Weird tour.

Once in the library, I seek out some large print Mills and Boon to introduce my poem about the carousels of romance in the mobile libraries of Cambridgeshire.

After the tales and poems, I chat away and agree to a gig for the Hemel Hempstead Quakers who are feeling the agony of the world at the moment and need some cheerleading. Let the cruel and the rotten not steal the last of our smiles, the best rebellion needs joy in its heart and love in its arms.

The evening is Berkhamsted bookshop.

My eldest sister is in, she will be my roadie for the next four days. There is a great sense of community in the audience. The questions are many and varied. People tell me the book is very honest, at times almost shockingly for some. Sometimes I think, “have I said too much?” And then I think, are we all too silent, masking as our flesh and bones and thoughts gnaw away at us. I have maybe 100 destinations and shows in the next 80 days so think it is best I don’t go to the pub.

I go to the pub.

Tuesday is Cambridgeshire libraries - bricks and mortar not wheels and chassis.

I sit in Huntingdon library, chatting with readers, occasionally signing.

I recommend some books to a young mother and then see some Dr Seuss’s are in the 20 pence sale so tell her such things cannot be left behind. I love the excitement of books. Darren, the mobile librarian, has sorted today’s events. Like many I meet along the way with this new book, it was in middle age that he found out who he was meant to be.

Now he knows he is meant to be a librarian and he loves it.

We have a little gap before St Neots library so wonder through Huntingdon admiring the rubbish bins which celebrate the grumpy reign of the joy-despising Oliver Cromwell. Oh, how he must hate it when the the multi-coloured wrappers of ice lollies shriek with delight in him as the children sugar rush happily away.

We pop to a charity bookshop, The Next Chapter. I buy a WG Sebald hardback and, unusually, am drawn to something that says “Daily Express” on it. It is a children’s annual from 1930 with the most splendid and pristine pop up scenes of mermaids, flowers and albatross. Rather than “pop ups” they are described as “self erecting models”. We go to cafe and peruse the healthy options. My sister has a very green salad with Quinoa. I am unable to have that as the seeds can become bullets when public speaking. I opt for a strawberry milkshake and fries.

St Neot’s library is a talk. I tell my story about the actor Colin Jeavons and someone on the front row says, “I am the mother in law of one of his sons”.

When I throw it open to questions, the bookseller is the first to pipe up.

“Yes, my question is ‘what is your book called and what is it all about?’”

It seems I forgot to mention such fripperies in the talk about my book.

John Dowie is in the audience. I often turn to a piece he wrote called Why I Gave Up Stand Up Comedy. He is wise, but being from Birmingham, he bristles at compliments. We retire to his home and he shows the museum of him which includes his love of Batman from th4e Saturday morning serial days and a press cutting about the beautifully humane Neil Innes. We talk of our mutual love of The Lady Vanishes and Dead of Night. My sister and I depart with a book each. She takes John’s The Freewheeling John Dowie (we talked about it some years ago on Book Shambles) and his new book Before I Go. We all know that books are where the ghosts live and his memories of his father and mother make them vivid again.

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And so to Letchworth Garden City and the wonderful David’s. By good fortune, the art section has been shuttered up which has probably saved me a lot of money (it is fabulous).

I eat cake, gulp tea, and browse in the secondhand bookshop in the dimming upstairs of the shop. I leave with a small book of Beckett and a sixties book by an academic infuriated by free love and long haired bongoists in public parks.

There is a beautiful energy in the room and, again, so many questions.

One person says that they feel left out in the world of minds that veer from the emaciated path of normality because they are bipolar (bipolar is not on the neurodivergent list). We discuss the ham-fisted nature of labels and how much overlap there is in many conditions separated in the encyclopaedia of brain functions and other disturbances of peace.

Back at my sister’s house, I watch four episodes of I, Jack Wright, a new thriller about a family feuding over money from an aggressive patriarch’s will. The series was filmed in the house I grew up in, indeed, the house I am sitting in as I watch it. John Simm thieves jewellery from the bedroom I was born in and I am glad to see that the Geoff Dyer book I bought my dad is in shot.

I was listening to The Idiot by Iggy Pop and Careful of Your Keepers by This is The Kit

I am currently reading Birding by Rose Ruane

Bookshops that helped in this 36 hours were

Next Page Books, Hitchin

The Berkhamsted Bookshop

Niche Books and Comics, Huntingdon

Waterstones, St Neots

More tour dates at robinince.com

In the morning, we visit the Oxfam shop where a gentle man serves behind the counter and offers everyone a compliment.

He likes my beard.

He likes her hat.

We like him.

We pop into West Kirby Books to see if they would like to do an event, there is a little suspicion, but I think we will do something around the Who at Hoylake Doctor Who convention in the Autumn. My signature in the book will be for free, but if you fancy adding Frazer Hines’s to the front page you probably can for a few quid more.

Erica and Alan are off to be entertained by Nigel Havers, so while they prepare their silks and their tweeds, Alan’s dad kindly gives me a lift to Great Budworth. Great Budworth is a village that could easily be a movie set for Miss Marple or a martian invasion. It turns out the martians landed a few years back when the BBC adapted The War of the Worlds again.

I walk by the bowling green and find my clerihew for the evening.

On the Great Budworth Bowling Green

Field Mice are very rarely seen

Due to the forbidding scowl

Of a ceramic long-eared owl

The churchyard is a wonder, this was the place of burial for many villages.

Many gravestones are laid flat as a path around the church, walking on the dead is inescapable. The cherry blossoms are raining now and I look at a stone that has transformed into pink. Dennis Potter’s “blossomest blossom” is inescapable with such a panorama. The root of the tree has resurfaced a metre or so from the trunk and clawed over another tomb. It reminds me of the story that led to my poem that concludes

“Confused Confusing Absurd

But flashes of inspiration

And out of my ashes

May grow apples

Emergent complexity briefly defeats the void”

I read a book of philosophy, I think by Nicholas Fearn, which began with the story of man who died disdained by the local people and so was buried beyond hallowed ground. An apple tree grew above his grave. Many years later, when viewing the parish records, a local historian realised he had been unjustly demeaned and so dug him up to move him closer to the church.

What they found was a body transformed into a man-shaped tree root. All those who had been eating apples had been consuming a little of recycled pariah.

At the base of one of the church doors is a diorama of daisies and that provides the haiku (give or take a syllable)

Dusk daisies decorate

A high church doorway brightly

Sun falls petals close

After the gig, we walk to the pub where I meet two excellent black labradors and, again, meet people who had been a previous gig this week who wanted to hear the conclusions I had failed to give them two nights before.

Katy, my host, says it is highly unlikely that we will be sitting up til 1:30am as I have the other nights, and she is right, we all go to bed at 145am.

The next morning I return to the churchyard. It is not populated by young men in community service vests strimming and pruning. I am seeking out the grave of two teachers.

It is beautiful day and as I look across the churchyard, I see it is a view to the salt works - there is something pleasing about an eye taking in the memorials and blossoms but with the harsh metallic lines of industry in vision.

Peter drops me at the nearest station and I travel from the small rural idyll, still untainted by whatever secret witchcraft may have been hiding in the crypts, and arrive the fizzing metropolis of Chester. Their Oxfam fortunately adds no weight to my luggage and continue on to Storyhouse, a library theatre cafe filled with seeds of civilised existence. But before I can reach it, I find out about Books on the Walls, a bookshop cafe that lives in the city walls themselves. The second I see it, I know it is for me - scones and Patti Smith while a couple with an anxious dog sip martinis (the dog abstains).

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I get talking to Kate who is ebullient and full of joy and excellent cake ideas. Before long, we have hatched a plan to do an event in the shop.

I get chatting to the martini couple. She’s a teacher and he’s a truck driver. She also shows me a fantastic book of sketches. Like my pal, Joanna Neary, she always carries a book to ink the world in.

He was a teacher, but grew frustrated with the system. Despite the smallness of the shop, the thread of the web of stories is spun when a couple come in with their child, who is soon engrossed in The Tiger Who Came to Tea. It turns out, the dad is a former pupil and his fondness for the driver teacher is clear. It is also clear why he grew frustrated with his career, as it soon becomes clear he was driven by enthusiasm far more than paperwork. It clearly worked as this former pupil he taught technology to is a successful plumber.

On my departure I get talking to two more people, she is a book blogger and he has been part of the Just Stop Oil protests.

Unfortunately, I have left the shop with further book weight, including Gay Aliens and Queer Folk by Emily Garside and You Have Not Been Defeated by Alaa Abd El Fattah.

The final Cheshire Rural Touring Show is Tarvin Village Hall and Library. They have new toilets which they are very proud of. They were opened by Gyles Brandreth’s daughter. The brilliant Jen and Steph from rural touring kindly give me a lift to the village and I hastily rush off in search of some haiku and clerihew material. A dripping child on the street is shouting to his mum inside the pub that he has successfully completed the ice bucket challenge and managed five buckets.

The best clerihew I can fine in my limited walk is for their independent chemist.

In Tarvin it’s a delight to see

The Ian Littler pharmacy

How much better than a chain store

When I find my head is sore

I meet a woman who last me five years ago, when she was twelve.

At that point, she planned to be a physicist. At seventeen, she plans to be physiotherapist. I congratulate her on just turning one page of the encyclopedia as she changed her mind.

Back at the hotel, I eat cold Minestrone soup and prepare for the week to come.

Order a signed copy of Normally Weird from the Shambles shop here. Check out Robin’s many tour dates here.

I alway try to arrive at my destination a little early so that I can see what I can see. It might be an eccentric building, a peculiar name for a tattoo parlour or kebab shop, something growing out of a gravestone.

When I have to change trains, if I have more than 20 minutes of anticipation, I leave the station and make a small dent into the town, whether Kettering or Tamworth. I like to feed my head with possibilities whenever I can.

Though I don’t think I will ever need to enter the kebab shop, I am increasingly attracted to the tattoo parlour (why be the last living human in England with ink-less skin?). If Judi Dench can, why can’t I?

I would have Kathy Burke’s “I’d rather be woke than an ignorant fucking twat” inked on a shoulder blade .

In Macclesfield, I smile and say hello as I enter a charity shop and get that look of suspicion that can come from people caught unawares by the friendliness of a stranger.

In Macclesfield, I think of Alan Garner, who enchanted the surrounded landscape. I remember the first time I heard Love Will Tear Us Apart,. 45 years ago and it remains one of my favourite songs and my regular choice for Karaoke. I remember chatting to the superb drummer Stephen Morris about watching Hawkwind with his mum and dad in the town. These were the days where the electronic extraterrestrial journeys were interpreted by the naked dancing of Stacia. Stephen’s mother soon left the hall, his father departed soon after. Stpehen described his next breakfast as “a cold morning over the marmalade”.

Usually, my reason to arrive in Macclesfield is usually to journey to Jodrell Bank, location of Brian Cox explaining the heat death of the Universe to me before burning his mouth on a hot steak pie. On this occasion, I am off to Siddington Village Hall. I am rural touring and more memorial halls await me over the next five days.

The organisers of event take me to their house and I admire the blossoms on their plum tree. My nature eyes are at their sharpest in Spring. I still fail to name most of the flowers, but I am enthralled by the transformation in their beauty. This week, the dandelions are transforming from bright suns to seed planets.

It is a long thin room and the crows (or is it rooks, I am bad on corvids as well as flowers) are creating a poe-is cacophony (yes yes I know that’s a raven).

Serenity Books from Stockport are in attendance, a partnership based on autism and ADHD, so we have much to talk about. One week until Normally Weird is officially out, so these are the first copies I see and sign.

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I return to Levenshulme and my pal Carl’s fold out bed. He is off to Vienna the next morning and I warn him of the dancing horses. They dance traditionally and politely in the light, but stay up too late and walk the dark streets, and you may be trampled under hoof as the groomed.

I also start writing a film in my head. It is a world where matadors taunt unicorns rather than bulls. On one side of the arena sit leathery man and a zombie Ernest Hemingway, on the other sit eight year old children willing victory on the unicorns. In the final scene, the children slaughter the leathery men and the drops of blood that fly into the air are caught by beams of light to create a rainbow. It will be a My Little Pony movie written by Jodorowsky - I reckon it could be a sleeper hit, I just need to start writing the songs.

Two libraries the next day, Wilmslow by day and Hope Farm by night.

As I patrol the shelves in Wilmslow, I meet the parents of Chris Addison and have a lovely conversation with them which includes us wondering where we can find a history of Mills and Boon when there were a medical publisher. Somewhere in their evolution they realised that there was more cony to be made writing about doctors and nurses than writing for them - from the tourniquet to the torrid, from artery forceps to amorous flings.

I arrive early at Hope Farm and fall into conversation with a library user named Joyce. She is an artist, though family needs have slowed down her possibilities for now.

I am collected by Erica and Alan and taken to West Kirby where I sit up with Alan’s parents enjoying too much wine.

The next day is Knutsford library. In the front row is another Joyce. The library is her haven. With only one surviving family member, the library is her place to be alive and connected. We talk after my talk and I am deeply moved by what she says. Later, I realise that I was thinking about what my mother would have been like had she reached her eighties or beyond and if she had not been blighted in her late sixties by dementia, most probably brought on by the brain injuries she suffered in a car crash. Who could she have become had a driver not been on the wrong side of the road driving at speed on a country lane.

I am fond of the name Joyce. A Joyce was the mother of a school friend and she became a very good friend to my mother before dementia took her too. She used to have a short haired dachshund called Lady Mindy Bacon.

I arrive in Plumley and soon meet some of the audience from two night before. They have come to another show as I never told them the promised stories about Peter Cushing and about Apollo 8 at Siddington.

I write a clerihew about Plumley station and my hosts ask if it can be placed on the wall of platform two, I happily agree.

Order a signed copy of Normally Weird from the Shambles shop here. Check out Robin’s many tour dates here.

I reply, “No”.

“How?”

“Because I now walk on stage believing that everyone wants to have a nice time, so I walk on with love for the audience . Our relationship may hot rocky ground, but I think to start without fear or aggression is a positive place to be”.

I think if that is your way in, then you start to look very mean-spirited in the audience if you decide to be abusive or snarky.

Many comedy clubs I used to play would start with with mockery of the audience, I did it too. It felt both necessary and expected.

You will see many posts on TikTok of a comedian asking questions of an audience member and then character assassinating them. The best people at this ultimately create an inclusive sense of mockery, “it’s all a game”, for others, there is a sense of fear and anxiety (see Alistair Green’s brilliantly excruciating “man in the front of a comedy club”) .

Once this stall has been set, then there is an expectation from both sides that this is combat as well as comedy.

In Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, I have written about my first meeting with my longest serving friend, Ed. We were both 13 years old, sat on a school bus after a tiring cross country run and rowing exercises. We were both in the first few months of attending boarding school. These were not happy times.

I was jocular as I looked at Ed’s red face and said it was all bit rubbish having to do that run and he told me to piss off. Now I know why.

Within the first few weeks, such horrible things were done to Ed that all his trust had in anyone had been eviscerated. How first presumption was that this must be a conversation that was preparing for attack.

We bonded a little later over Starburst magazine and have been friends for 42 years.

This is how too much of the world works. Threat, real, and frequently fantasised by the media, closes in on us like a Carpenter fog (or Stephen King mist, all correct meteorological terms I assure you). From this point onwards, we must always be prepared to defend ourselves.

To be happy is to be weak.

To fail to see the worst in everyone is high naivety. For the last ten years, I have felt the level of aggression in the air is on the increase, an aggression that comes from being scared of the world or scared of being “found out”, too be hopeful is to be weak.

I used to walk through the world scared until I found the right diagnosis and the right pills. I also always tried to be helpful, but with a greater anxiety about my helpfulness may be relived or rejected.

I used to depart the house with anxiety, a myriad of imagined scenarios with every possible confrontation.

Now, I do not.

Nor do I think it is more “sophisticated” to be negative.

I believe that kindness and happiness are weapons.

A quote that has stayed with me is from The Invisible Painting, a memoir of her written by her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington.

“For people who live in emotional poverty, other people’s happiness is a threat”.

Once you understand that your unhappiness is a goal of many columnists , pundits and politicians, then you gain the stamina to defeat their aims. This is not the same as accepting them or their actions. Misery can be exhausting , I don’t think it makes us more powerful when it comes to fighting oppression. Another quotation that has inspired me was found in Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather.

It is about 'reparative reading’ (an idea of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick). It is to be “fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn't mean being naïve or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments.”

If we start each day from the point of defeat, where do we go to?

If we leave our home each day thinking, “I wonder how many people I can be an ally to today. I wonder how many people I can make less fearful of the world?” , then we start the day from a position of power. If we are able to think like this, to find space to contemplate this notion, then we must be aware that we already have more freedom than many in this world, and how exactly can we use our freedom to increase the freedoms of others?

We are right to be angry at the betrayals we see in the world. We are right to march forward and aim to change what we see. Each day let us approach the world with the aim of finding allies, not enemies. And when the sneerers approach, don’t give them a second. They will build nothing and only suck your energy, we have better ways to spend our time.

Order signed copies of Robin’s new book now from the Shambles shop.

Young women are moving to the left, young men to the right. The breakdown shows that 61% of women between the age of 18 and 29 voted Democrat in the recent election, while (for the purpose of this piece will we say that Democrats are left wing) only 47% of men in the same age bracket. In no age group were there more men voting democrat than women, and only the 45 to 64 age group saw more women voting Republican than Democrat (50% to 49%).

Tim expressed his worry that the move to the right for the boys comes from a lack of positive stories about boys and a lack of visible role models. It was a brief clip and I hope I am not misrepresenting him. The intention here is in no way to have a go at Tim, but to look at this argument as it comes up frequently, and it worries me.

The story of boys lost due to lack of role models and positive stories may be popular because the mass media has not evolved to deliver complex stories. The average output makes The Little Mermaid look like Finnegan’s Wake. They are keen on the binary - who are the goodies? who are the baddies? See how Piers Morgan relentlessly bullies his guests with those simple moral questions that usually begin, “do you condemn (place name of group or individual here)?”

Yes or no is demanded. Yes or no plays well because it gives you no further information or education, just a brief emotional spike.

The answer to “Why are young men maybe moving to the right and toxic misogyny?” Because they are bereft of role models and stories is easy to swallow before the indigestion of outrage.

It also means that this can be seen to point the blame at those who are supposedly getting all the positive stories - women.

My belief is that white males believe they are not getting a fair amount of the stories and role models because they keep being told just that by people fuelling this narrative. As we know from TV and politicians, the game is just to make people believe a truth, even if their experience does not reflect that, tell them often enough and they’ll find a pattern that secures that belief.

I think it is now more than 35 years ago since I first read that “nowadays you have to be a one legged black Lesbian” to get any rewards and promotions. Despite that, I still don’t see that many one legged black lesbians running the Bank of England or the BBC.

Similarly, it was over thirty years ago that I first started reading in columns by the likes of Richard Littlejohn and Robin Page that the worst thing to be nowadays (always always NOWADAYS), was a straight white middle class man. Write and publish this enough time and it becomes common knowledge whatever the evidence (similarly, see the BBC’s famous “left wing bias”).

At a recent event, a concerned man told me that it seemed everyone on the BBC was gay. This will be news to Professor Brian Cox, Clive Myrie, Charlie Stayt, Naga Munchetty, Claudia Winkleman, Gary Lineker, Matt Allwright, Fiona Bruce, Jim Al-Khalili and and and ….

The Geena Davis Institute has researched representation of women in the movies, found that there is a habit of wildly overestimating the representation of women - a group that has been underrepresented in the past seems wildly overrepresented just by making an appearance.

This leads us on to “Where are the progressive versions of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson?” Firstly, progressiveness is underrepresented in the media, perhaps because it is owned and run by those who benefit most from the system as it is. Secondly, it is far easier to create a passionate argument if you have no interest on evidence. Simple bigotry is an easy sell. You tell someone who is unhappy that it is the fault of that group of people who don’t look like them and that makes a quick emotional connection.

Tate is a simple bigot. Jordan Peterson is a convoluted one, but it boils down to simple bigotry despite the thorny maze of words he draws us through. Nothing is simple with Peterson, except what it all boils down to in the end.

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We also have the problem that there is an obsession with bad news and negative angry people. We are told that is what sells, but frequently there is not much effort in offering something different or better. Have a raging bigot and you should have clickbait. Kindness doesn’t make the fireworks that someone hateful can create, though when well used, empathy makes a light that lasts far longer.

“There just aren’t any white guy heroes anymore because of DIVERSITY!”

You will have cries of despair and “so unfair!” When a franchise puts in too many leading female characters (one) or leading black characters (one also). There is a narrative that the white male hero story is gone and that’s why the boys are lost.

Here are the major movies of 2024. I have ignored cartoons, much as I love good animation, deciding that role models are best when flesh, even if heavily CGIed.

Deadpool and Wolverine - two white male mutants.

Wicked - Two female lead witches.

Dune: Part Two - Six male characters on the poster , four female

King Kong vs Godzilla - Lead actor and hero of the film who saves Kong is white male

Venom - main star and poster figure - white male

Gladiator - 5 men to one woman on the poster - star and hero is a white man

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - stars a man BUT poster has three women with major parts in it and one person with a shrunken head.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die - two male heroes only characters on the poster

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes - one woman hero , central on the poster, two male apes either side.

Twisters - one male hero wind chaser centre of the poster, one major role woman to his left and a young man to his right.

And so it goes on (I just went through the first fifteen major films of 2024, but could go on). For a world where the white male hero has been erased, they still seem to be doing okay. I think lizards and apes get almost as much top billing as women.

Look at Forbes highest paid sports stars and you will see it illustrated by five sport stars, a boxer, a baseball player, footballer, basketball player, and a golfer, all men. According to the figures for the Top 100 highest paid in 2024, none of them are women.

Nine out ten of the highest paid comedians in the UK are men, and that is true in the US too.

Can we not start making heroes out of any of these people?

If this is lack of role models is what makes men rudderless then are we saying only a world where every hero is a man is workable?

I think this is more about the effectiveness of propaganda.

Look at Trump demanding the Tate brothers are allowed to roam.

Look at the sexual predators who have gained power.

Look at the archaic ideology that true men are bullies who are served by their obedient wives.

Many men no longer have the security they once had, but that’s not because there is a woman hero in Star Wars, it is because the very men who gain by pushing them to the point of profitable misogyny are also the ones who have played the system of putting personal profit over community needs. They have rinsed every penny and dime out of the system, and having destroyed the possibilities of job security and union comradeship, now tell the people they broke that it is the fault of women or refugees.

I worry that the argument of no role models feeds very easily into the anti Diversity Equity Inclusion argument. The media has all the power and possibility to change the narrative, just by reporting the reality and giving more space those that believe in positive progress rather than the easy score of platforming those who desire a wretched world for anyone who is not them.

It is leaky box, and anxiety rushed from the cracks and poured bitter treacle on my path of progression. It is still full of holes, but now it is words rather than panic that flood from it.

Since, May last year, I have filled ten notebooks with probable, possible, even definite, poems. It feels like the most exciting development in my artistic life in the last decade, possibly in my whole career. It has given me a new freedom to express myself in more directions than I have been able to before. Also, for once, I don’t feel like an impostor. I was worried when I took to the stage at Morecambe Poetry Festival, there were many REAL poets in the audience and Attila the Stockbroker in the front row. That feeling at the end of my hour was akin to the feeling I had over thirty years ago when I came off a stand up stage and everything had worked. It was a feeling of a vast new potential and an even greater freedom from the tyranny of the punchline (not that I’ve felt that tyranny for some years now).

Until 2016, my most impressive poem was the one that was published in the school magazine when I was ten. It was about Autumn, the usual basket of words about crunchy leaves and frosted spider’s webs.

I took a bit of a break from performing in late 2015 which “luckily” coincided with the death of my mother. There were many things to be done. I had stopped live performing for my usual reason, an immersive sense of failure blended with self hatred. By January 2016, the pressure in my skull had built up and I knew that I must release some of the words in their before my head bone cracked open, spewing neurones and viscous brain goo across the bus. My first gig back was The Old Labour Club in Northampton with Alan Moore, the day after my birthday. I decided I should risk something I hadn’t done before, so thought that I would write a poem to perform. I started simple and wrote a list poem. It was about all the artists, scientists and grand figures I was better than, not due to what I had created, but because I reached the age of 47 and they didn’t.

It began…

I am now older than

Kurt Cobain, Thomas Chatterton

Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot,

Lord Byron,

Frida Kahlo

Percy Shelley,

Marilyn Monroe,

James Dean

Joseph Goebbells,

Jane Austen

and Caravaggio

It was a long day on wikipedia, via Django Reinhardt, Lisa Left Eye Lopez and Gilda Radner, it concluded

Charlotte Bronte

Emily Bronte

Ann Bronte

and Branwell

I beat all of you

in years

….but not artistically

It was fun to perform, throwing in odd flourishes, hasty rhythms, and mangled rhymes.

A few weeks later, I built a den with my son in the woods that I played in as a child. The woodland where the roots of every fallen tree became a space pod on an alien planet or a trench for an Action Man.

After my son had fallen asleep that night, I wrote a poem about our day, pondering on whether this would be the final den we built as he continued his journey to adulthood, so slow for him, so first for me.

You don’t need a storyteller now

your bedtime is almost autonomous

but still

one snuggly hug

for safety from the sandman

is today the day?

is this our final den?

And so it continued. A day later, I went to perform it and saw the power of poetry in action, half of the room were crying, including my friend, John, who lost his son in a motorbike crash. He told me he was annoyed with me because he didn’t like poetry and he didn’t cry in public, both those things had changed now.

At a gig in memory of Isaac Newton in Grantham, I suggested that Professor Cox watch me perform the poem as I thought it might be suitable for our next tour show. He agreed. I was now in the envious position of performing my new poetry to audiences of five thousand or more. Feedback was positive, except for one night in Brighton where the words took a mother and daughter by surprise and stirred up a great sadness in them for a brother and son who was gone.

Progress continued slowly, maybe seven poems a year.

A new arena tour on the horizon, Brian told me to write another poem.

Sat on Wembley Central station platform, a poem about starlight and anxiety arrived in one piece, and I performed this one to even more people. My greatest pride is that someone on the USA leg was so taken by the words that he had one of the lines tattooed on his arm.

Emergent complexity briefly defeats the void

Then, I broke the seal and ten poems rapidly became two hundred.

It is a rare day when I don’t write one or two poems.

The trick is to catch them as they form, I cannot hold them for too long and they are often gone if I don’t write them down within the first minute.

A fully formed poem about a shuttered shop, thinking of the day 72 years before, when Davies and Son opened their jewellers, and the pride as they looked on their shops, now gone and a palimpsest of graffiti, appeared by the time I got my book out at the railway station I could see that I had already lost the pattern that I’d seen so clearly just five minutes before.

It is an exciting and a perfect process for the ADHD mind. Something is casually seen, a firework of a thought ignites a trail of words, and then it is on the page and ready to perform to an audience, either in front of them or via bluesky or instagram. There are too many to put out, and some fade as I move further from the original thought, which means there is always a handy backlog.

I think what has happened is that my negative hyper-vigilance has become positive scrutiny. Much of my conscious brain was, until April 2022, preoccupied with seeking possible threats, most of them fabricated by my anxiety. Through medication and diagnosis, this sense of perpetual threat is almost entirely eradicated, which means that my eyes remain beady, but they’re beady for beauty and interesting questions that can be found growing out of a wall, in the shape of a cloud, or in the peculiarity of a conversation I am eavesdropping on (I can’t help but eavesdrop, I find blocking out others’ conversations very tricky).

It means that what I write is instinctual. I find this similarly with taking photographs. I am perpetually excitedly distracted by shapes and form and moss, but I know if I feel the need to stop and think about why I am taking the photograph, then it is a photograph that is not needed.

I find it interesting to see how people receive the poetry and when it does make people cry or move them, because there is so little design in them. Like many other neurodivergent people, I am in a near perpetual state of questions and thoughts and also not always good at, or interested, in following the staid rules of socialising. I can be quite matter of fact about things that other people consider almost taboo, and using this pattern of poetry, devoid of filter, excites me in terms of it possible connections.

It throws away the necessity of concealment.

I think I have found my most exciting means of expression, I hope you have found one too. Do not be shy with your imagination, let it overwhelm you whenever you can.

Robin's brand new website has launched today which includes links to pre-order signed copies of his new book and the first batch of 2025 tour dates. There are LOADS more to come. Visit it at robinince.com

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“Hello straight white men with good hearts and solid morals: I am looking at you. You look very nice in that new shirt. Nobody hates you. But you are going to need to start speaking up now, like a LOT. There’s fascists everywhere and they won’t listen to us.”

That was Katy Brand’s first post on Instagram on Tuesday morning.

It is something I have been thinking about a lot.

Why are we such terrible allies?

Why do we so often think, “it’s none of my business really” or “better not to get involved”

When talking about men frequently only reading books by other men, I think it was Alice Lowe who told me, “Men’s stories are considered to be for everyone. Women’s stories are presumed to be only of interest to women”.

In non-fiction, until very recently, the reader and the protagonists were almost always referred to as “he”.

“Yes, but everyone knows it doesn’t really mean ‘he’, it’s just grammatically easier than ‘they’” is a frequent reply, but I don’t believe making the human being a human he-ing is quite as anodyne as those who hide behind correct grammar rather than addressing ALL readers.

Once you notice, this soft prejudice becomes inescapable.

I think many men may are also worried about being considered woke, as if empathy is a weakness. In the nineties, it was the fear of being a “new man”. This idea of having any interest in women’s lives or attempting to actually be helpful was soon framed as weak and passive. In terms of woke, I will never tire of quoting Kathy Burke, “I’d much rather be woke than an ignorant fucking twat”.

Don’t think it is weak to say something if your pal says something misogynistic, sometimes gentle challenges lead to interesting conversations.

Men may also worry that if they try to be more of an ally, it will lay them open to attack because they themselves are not perfect. “Well, Mikey, interesting you favourably quoted Everyday Sexism on TikTok the other day considering you told that wife beating joke in The Coach and Horses in 2011!” The power structures of bigotry are allowed to be whatever they want, to flip flop in their hypocrisies, to challenge the status quo in any way means you must be perfect because they are bound to find something. Better to stand for nothing as you cannot be maligned for your position when you have none (though of course, having no position and taking the status quo as a simple benign reality is a position in itself).

To be ready to fight, means we must also be ready to have stones hurled at you and, more often than not, hurled with utterly bad faith. We are imperfect. We will fail, but understanding that is also how we progressive, better to move forward than remain safe in silence. Remember, those criticising you are rarely doing so out of any ethical belief, but just because they want you to shut up.

Thirdly (or is it fourthly), we still have a strange attitude to friendships between the sexes. Go to a party or a bar and more often than not, the men are grouped with men and the women are gathered with women.

Why? (personally, I find such single sex huddling VERY BORING).

There is still suspicion around men who like hanging out with women.

There is still thinking like that of the lobster fetishist and beef steak gobbler J Peterson who finds the idea of a lack of certainty on gender identity makes his head spin like a waltzer. In an interview, he expressed his panic if attempting to talk to someone who is not officially sanctioned male or female from the outset. He explained that he does not talk to men and women in the same way, and in that way he adds to that intel confusion on the level of humanity of women.

If you a man goes out for a drink with a woman, there are those that will either make lascivious gestures or be utterly confused by the idea of a conversation whose sole agenda is to have an enthralling conversation.

It reminds me of a story Barry Cryer told me about when he was in 1960s clubland and was sat on a table with some Maltese gangsters. A henchman left bleeding and broken nosed because he had let slip a swearword in earshot of Barry’s wife. Extreme violence was acceptable, swearing in front of a lady not - that was the man’s way.

I have been fortunate to have strong women in my life, including two older sisters who helped me through my anxious childhood, two late teen friends, Heather and Carolyn, who introduced me to books by feminists and new arguments of existence, and many others a long the way, including my firm friends Josie Long and Grace Petrie.

Am I a feminist?

I wouldn’t call myself a feminist because I generally avoid being a noun, it is just too certain for me, whether it is saying I am “A comedian” or “AN author” . I don’t even have ‘he/him’ or any of the alternatives on my information because even that feels like a definite too much (I know, you may think that is silly).

Furthermore, there is a new suspicion of the male who declares themselves “a feminist” as people like Neil Gaiman are revealed to have an odd relationship with the term and the actions expected if you consider yourself one . But what you call yourself doesn’t matter, what you do and what you say is the important bit.

What can we do?

These are just my thoughts, not a manifesto.

One is to listen. (I have to add a little note in parentheses. I have received many angry messages on social media telling me to “listen to the women” because I questioned the dehumanising positions of certain male comedians towards the trans community. I had been listening to the women, just not the women who who were vehemently against trans inclusion. I had been listening to Carolyn and Grace and Josie and my other lifelong female friends. I was told that I was listening to the wrong women).

Two is to not think that it is weak to consider women your equals. This seems to be the way of Andrew Tait and those men that define manliness as being a bully or being superior. This demonstration of strength is really weakness that comes from feeling threatened and confused. Power over women seems really to come from fear of women and the power they may have to emotionally affect you amongst other things.

We need to listen out for young men who are drawn towards the incel movement, offer them not just strong male role models, but also stories of strong women - we need to chip away this sense of immediate division that grows from the playgroup onwards.

If you are in the position to, create more platforms for women’s voices.

It has been nearly twenty years that we’ve been curating the Nine Lessons and Carols for Curious People and other science variety shows. I look back now with embarrassment about how male the bills were in the early days, particularly in terms of representation of scientists.

The most obvious public scientists were nearly all male and they dominated those bills. As time went on, we put in the effort required to diversify and each year it becomes easier and easier to fill the nights with a far more diverse group of scientists and with that came a far greater variety of stories and approaches.

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You will often hear that “positive discrimination” will lead to a lowering of standards, I think that is balderdash. Though it can sometimes means that the bill may not have as many “famous names”, the decrease in celebrity creates an increase in the possibilities of who will be at the forefront in the future.

We are not “enforcing positive discrimination”, we are looking harder and for longer and in doing so I believe constantly improving our shows.

Read more books by women, watch more films by women, know that their story is part of our story, to be interested in women’s stories is to be interested in human stories, the lives of women should not be deemed a sub genre or niche interest.

#NOTALLMEN

“Not all men”

Sure.

But oh so many men

And as one,

Negligibly,

Some very male males may say,

I cannot comprehend

How so many abuses never end

The man whose legs spring open

Like misogynistic secateurs

As he takes the train seat by your side

Blurs the boundaries

Both ambivalent to your existence

Yet the knee rub is persistent.

A woman smiling at a stranger

Should not lead to danger

Yet friendliness is so often deformed into an offer.

All that late night threat

Dismissed as “just a joke”

Or “you’re too woke”.

In Washington

A house has open gates

For a relentless predator .

While previous presidents were pleased to cajole fellatio

And then,

Post priapism,

Turn their flirtatious face into angry denial

“that woman!

That woman!

That woman!”

A comment on a stranger’s breast and the rest

Should surely be confined into a past

But still

Not yet

If we wish to be “not all men!”

If we want to prove Solanas wrong

Then we will show that to be truly strong

A man won’t stand in silence

As their sisters fight alone

But as I chant along, a negative voice nags me, saying, “Will we? And, if so, how?”

It is something I often feel when I am at Billy Bragg’s Leftfield in Glastonbury.

Each year, you sit and hear powerful speeches by eloquent activists and rousing anthems by all manner of troubadours and you leave with filled hope and ready for action. Then, one year, as you leave, you hear a voice that says, “all of that talk of change and yet a month after leaving the field, another oppressive bully won a seat at the international table and another political party threw away its ambitions for true compassion and ethical policies”.

Another day, another eye of newt and wing of bat under the steamroller of financial progress.

Then, another voice chips in, “where would we be without those sing-a-longs of We Shall Overcome and This Land is Your Land?”

Cynicism is the safest space.

We may look at the failed demonstrations, the activism that didn’t halt the demolition ball and say “well, that was a waste of time”, but how much more rubble might there have been had no one stood up, had every resigned, the most active offering up a vague sigh.

If only we had a few more politicians with the energy I see at demonstrations, but so many will patronisingly explain that “the real world is a lot more complicated than you crazy dreamers imagine”, failing to realise that they have hands in shaping that real world.

What use is there in power if when you get it you hand in your ambitions in return for keeping power and keeping the powerful happy?

I have great admiration for the courage of the Just Stop Oil protesters who, for being caught planning peaceful protest, have been given sentences longer than those given to people who have violently attacked their partners. Violence towards a spouse is less likely to interfere with capitalism and so is of less importance.

I have spoken at a couple of Just Stop Oil protests and a fundraiser and so have had the opportunity to meet the friends and the family of those currently inside prison.

I am confounded to exist in a world where to knowingly trash the planet for profit, and often sow misinformation about science, is good business, and to be committed to peaceful protest to try and preserve the delicate equilibrium that makes our planet so vivacious is tantamount to being a terrorist.

There is a bleak humour in stopping traffic being a crime when so many town and country planners are doing it all the time via poorly thought out routes, lanes and repairs.

I love art and I love art galleries, but the reason I love them is because they offer further opportunities to experience beauty. That is why I understand that throwing tomato soup at a glass covered painting of sunflowers has some reason. If we can be outraged by soup being thrown at a masterpiece, then shouldn’t we be even more outraged by the incredibly complexity and colours of nature being crushed not out of necessity but because of profitability. The world has much technology that is far less damaging than what is used now, but the system to make sure it brings in profits and dividends has not been worked out, and so the companies move as slowly as they can to preserve the lifestyles of a few while destroying the lives of many.

I understand why it is easy to rile people by gluing yourself to the road, but when Richard Madeley yet again mounts a high horse and speaks for “the inconvenienced”, we see very little concern for the inconvenience of your house burning down, your workplace being destroyed in a hurricane, or your seaside bungalow becoming a submarine. Or the grumbling annoyance of food shortages and the mild inconvenience of child deaths.

Whenever I put anything up about climate change protests, I will usually get a smattering of people, some bots, some possibly flesh, saying, “actually, I think these protests are doing more harm for the cause than good”. Generally, I think the people saying that aren’t really particularly bothered, addicted instead to a pasty, grumbling inaction that is made of little more than whining. If you have the energy to whine about protesters, then have another spoon of sugar and trying and get the energy to whine about the industries that are hastening extinctions.

So often, we find that we are not angry about the those creating the problem, but angry with those who are highlighting it.

The job of so many with platforms of political and media power is to make a fairer society for all a ridiculous pipe dream, the notion of pampered fantasists. The press have an interesting obsession when it comes to the class of protestors. They aim to discredit protest by framing it as a hobby of rich brats called Jacinta who dare to break the rules of capitalism with their protests. It is their version of class war. It is a simple way of dismissing protest as a facile hobby and as if it is all the actions of a self loathing aristocracy.

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This has not been true of those I have met, activism does not seem to be an old boy network with a special handshake, though a reasonably good power salute.

There are still more old Etonians and Harrovians in Westminster than there are in the average protest march.

As with so many arguments against a good life for all versus profit for the few, these arguments are offered in bad faith and, more often than not, a supercilious sneer.

Standing in the protest, I watched speaker after speaker eloquently express the issues we are facing, both environmentally and politically, as we have seen the right to protest chiselled away enthusiastically under both Conservative and Labour governments. When I go to speak myself, I feel nerves that I no longer feel at any other speaking events.

I watch Caroline Lucas speak and I wish for more politicians like her.

My only regret is drinking that extra glass of red wine the night before, I had forgotten just how many percussionists gather at rallies.

An iceberg crumbles

A species dies

A glacier retreats

The world fries

So humdrum

This destruction

The fires that rage

Don’t make the pages

Fails to stir a paid opinion

The artless typists

Waiting for something

to be truly pissed about

And the complexity of life

And their cosiness with capitalism

Just doesn’t drip ink

Doesn’t lubricate the pen

BUT SOUP!

SOUP !

SOUP!

OH!

The whoops of easy outrage

For soup on sunflowers

Broth on Van Gogh

Like Vichyssoise on Vermeer

Custard on a Klimt

lasagne on a Leonardo

Or Trifle on a Turner

Pot Noodle at a Pissaro

What next!!

Throwing faces at masterpieces !!

Black Forest Gateau on a Gauguin

Is worse than the deforestation of the Amazon

Celery Soup on a Sisley

worse than sewage in the Severn

Placing pate on a Picasso

Is worse than pesticidal genocide

The ability to regrow a rainforest

Or rebuild an atmosphere

May take more effort than

Wiping Vegemite off a Vermeer

Or waffles off a warhol

Better to butcher a planet

Than bouillabaisse a Basquiat

No pissholes in the snow!!

At eighteen years old, bowdlerisation of cult movies was a major bugbear of mine.

My newspaper communications were a snarky letter to The Times about the Thatcherite regime, a teenager showing off and failing to make the grade, and a letter to an Australian broadsheet, I cannot remember which one, but it made me even more furious than Michael Caine’s mouth being wasted out with soap. Sat up outside Sydney at 3am, out of sync with the clocks, I read an interview with Kurt Vonnegut. It was a hatchet job by hack.

Starting by criticising Vonnegut for being dishevelled (he was eighty three and, if one ever needs to earn the right to be dishevelled, then Vonnegut deserved that right). The disdain bled across the page. It seems that the hack was outraged that Vonnegut said that he could understand the Bali bombers. In daring to comprehend terrorist actions, the confused scribbler could not understand that this was not the same as condoning. Vonnegut had seen some of the most grotesque atrocities of the second world war and been committed to peace, I left the pages outraged by the lack of understanding for Vonnegut’s intentions or his work.

Near dawn, I spilled my anger and mailed it.

None of the letters ever bothered the pages, but as was once almost written, The Master’s Broadsheets (or TV listings magazines) will not Dismantle the Master’s House.

I was reading Vonnegut today.

I was thinking of the advice from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s that so often sings inside my head, we spend too much time identifying poison and not enough time seeking nourishment.

On a day where any pretence of American politics not being a criminal act is finally eviscerated, we need to fill ourselves with noble and passionate voices.

On the day of Trump’s inauguration, I started with Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned - Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Her reply to the question of who her book was for, “Everyone who knows a world where queer black feminine folk are living their fullest, most abundant and loving lives is a world where everyone is free” (I am quoting from memory, so it may be a bit off, but you get the gist) brings inspiration to me whenever I read it.

I am pale stale male and, to make it even worse, I am probably technically defined as woke.

But fuck that.

I’d rather be this form of ludicrous than a greedy bully bigot who wears their inability to comprehend progress with pride and the expectation of candy treats from Rogan or Peterson, who fondle their callousness and ignorance like a pontiff caressing his elongated crucifix.

I hurriedly pack further inspiration into my rucksack, including a book of interviews with Howard Zinn. Zinn was a groundbreaking anarchist historian, or in his own words, "something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist.” He was beloved by the equally inspirational Arundhati Roy, who wrote of him, “a teacher who belongs to that most unusual tradition of academics - intellectually rigorous but unafraid of taking sides when it is right and just to take sides”. In the first interview, he talks of those in “the suites” who define crime.

“If somebody holds up a store or robs someone on the street, of course, those are crimes. If somebody robs consumers of millions of dollars or robs workers of their lives because of unsafe work conditions, that’s not a crime. That’s business.”

Whenever you read Zinn, the quotation that often returns to mind is from The Great Gatsby, “They were careless people…they smashed up things and then retreated back into their money”. What we will impotently watch over the next four years is the merciless smashing up of things so that there will be more and more money to retreat into.

On my wall, next to my framed letter from Boris Karloff’s widow, is a letter from Howard Zinn to Barry Crimmins, recommending Barry as a fine human being. It was given to me by the photographer Helen Crimmins, he was married to Barry until his death. Barry always fought for the bullied and the oppressed, often to great personal cost. I think of his furious and poetic outrage. I think of his summary of those edgy comedians, the ones that pick the simplest path to bullying those who are already frequently dehumanised.

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“You know who the biggest suckheads in the world are? The people who think they're clever by saying, 'Well, I happen to be politically IN-correct.' And now you get to act like you're a cutting edge rebel, because you're reinforcing the oppressive status quo! You sack of fucking rancid horse assholes!”

I also flick through Empire of Illusion - The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges. I first came across this book when I was in New York and Trump was campaigning to become the Republicans presidential candidate. It still seemed too absurd then, though months later it was reality.

The speed of absurdity to reality is something we should keep thinking on as we watch what happens to in both USA and UK politics. We should also remember that when the absurd becomes reality, it does not immediately need to be accepted as normal, something our media usually forgets.

The chapter I return to of Hedges’s book is the one that explains how political discourse in America has become the spectacle of wrestling. Written back in 2009, he discusses Trump’s love of getting in the ring to be part of the glitter and pomp. In Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, the President of the USA is wrestler who treats government like Saturday night primetime on WCW and is killing all the crops due to his belief in irrigating them with Gatorade.

I read some comic strips from the comic book anthology Femme Magnifique, one of Ursula Le Guin another on Octavia Butler, I have packed Parable of the Talents in my back to read again.

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” Ursula Le Guin

And then I turn back to Vonnegut and his final book, the book he wrote after he thought he had retired from writing. The book that came from the outrage of Bush Jr’s government. (let us not look back on Bush Jr and, due to the new extremes, see him as less destructive than he was. The path to Trump was laid by spiteful, ignorant and duplicitous men like him and Ronald Reagan).

The difference between men like Trump and people like Butler, LeGuin, Vonnegut, Zinn and Crimmins is that their drive comes from making the world kinder for all, while the values we see being promoted and cheered for by the very people who will be destroyed them, are to destroy all who can be framed as “other” for no other purpose than ensuring a very small group of humans have the golden elevators they believe they deserve as whatever cost to others.

Vonnegut says of socialism, “‘socialism’ is no more an evil word than ‘christianity.’ Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society that all men, women, and children are created and shall not starve.”

This year, it will be more vital than ever to reach out to those who are being dehumanised and in despair because they are the collateral damage for wild profiteering.

We must try not to spend our energy on rage against the cruel and greedy, and use that energy to elevate the oppressed and the voices that speak for humanity not wealth.

I may say it too often, but Vonnegut’s advice always remains true, “Godammit, you’ve got to be kind”.

We quoted Marius Goring.

“One is starved for technicolor up there”.

And the beautiful conversation between David Niven and Kim Hunter. Descending in a bomber that is ablaze, Niven faces what he believes to be imminent death and so falls in love with a stranger who he has never met, but who will be his final conversation.

“I’ve known dozen of girls, I’ve been in love with some of them, but an American girl whom I’ve never seen and who I never shall see will hear my last words”

Tony had been brought to see my Satanic Rites of Robin Ince show, a chaos of febrile excitement from the grotesque stew of my love of horror movies.

He was so generous in his reaction and immediately we could see that we had shared inspirations and passions. I like exciting and excited brains.

Tony’s mind was the mind of an autodidactic and someone who was furiously intrigued and curious.

His ability to get to Cambridge University to read Modern Languages coming from a background without privilege gives you some idea of how smart he was. Whenever I spoke to people who had witnessed the Footlights he was in, sharing the stage with Fry and Laurie, Emma Thompson, Penny Dwyer and Paul Shearer, they would always say how Mercurial Tony was. His performance in the Kenneth Branagh film Peter’s Friends is beautifully judged and a high point of the movie.

Whose Line is it Anyway? Was a vital part of the week. Every Friday, I would go to my pals Carolyn and Heather’s flat in Kilburn and, often with the accompaniment of home-made mushroom pate, which seemed very counter cultural in those days, we would rejoice in the still arcane art of improvisation. While John Sessions might come across as the slightly pompous one, all references to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Rilke (or so it seemed), Slattery was Puck. He was mischief. (I should add I was a great fan of John Sessions too and would go to watch him late night at the Donmar Warehouse doing solo impro). The impishness of Tony reminds me of the similarly impishness of Kenny Everett, they both possessed irresistibility in their naughtiness.

I was also a fan of Slattery and Richard Vranch’s odd interludes on a late night music show, Cue the Music, which as far as I can recall seemed to be a show that always welcomed a late night audience to a recording of the band Magnum playing at The Town and Country Club. These were the early days of late night TV, shocking to some of you reading this, but all four TV channels that broadcast in the UK generally switched themselves off before midnight for fear if they kept the workers up, they might accidentally fall into a vat of tar the next morning. To stop it being just a straight music show in which producer Mike Mansfield would introduce that night’s band (Magnum), Vranch and Slattery would sit either side of him in exuberant wigs just being silly. It was delightfully pointless.

It feels very mean-sprinted now that there was a backlash against Tony , an attitude of “oh no, it’s Tony Slattery again”. There are many far less entertaining performers give endless TV vehicles, and, as so often, we didn’t realise how lucky we were. There is also the fear that it will dry up at any minute, so take anything you can while it is there. Unfortunately, that terror of workless days can be the very thing that leads to workless days (though for some reason, relentlessness has done nothing to stem the omnipresence of Jimmy Carr).

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In covering his life, many have commented on Tony’s addictions. The word “troubled” has often been used. This seems to place the responsibility on Tony, rather than on the sexual abuser who brutalised him as a child. He would allude to this, but usually move on. That there are still so many people living with a shame that should not be theirs or a belief that “it was all a long time ago” best to bury it, as it still gnaws their bones makes me deeply sad. What Tony had had robbed from him, the pain and the struggle that entailed for him, and those that loved him is another sign of a deeply unjust world.

The last time I worked with Tony was in November at the Berkhamsted book festival i. It was the final event of the day, so we moved from the Town Hall to a room above a pub. It was packed and we sat on bar stools and rambled to some purpose. What was most obvious was the weight of affection and of love for Tony. I received messages from many people after our event who expressed how fortunate they felt in getting the opportunity to listen to Tony, to see that he had new paths ahead of him. Many found the experience deeply moving. Sadly, our next event is not to be.

I wanted to talk so much more to him.

Darryl Bullock, who also died unexpectedly, just a few weeks before Tony, had a similar affect on me. Even though we saw each other rarely, it was always wonderful to see him and I when I saw the news of Darryl’s death I immediately saw the conversations I would be robbed of.

I should mention Erica and Allan, who worked so hard to get Tony back on the stage and gave him so much love and appreciation over the last few years.

And to Mark, his partner of 39 years, he showed what true love is.

I was meant to be doing a gig with Tony on 28th February at Fort Perch Rock, New Brighton. The gig will go ahead as a celebration of the life of Tony.