If you build it, they will come. Probably.
I’d checked train times before I left. I hadn’t checked if there would be any trains. Still, the replacement bus service ran smoothly enough and I reached Crawley on time, Waterstones had copies of my book, and there was an audience – not bad for an event where the time and the line-up had been changed and the venue on the website was still given as TBC. Counting the casual shoppers who occasionally stopped to listen the number almost certainly never fell below double figures. Not a great turnout, but then I’ve seen Les Murray read to an audience of twenty, and, only a few weeks ago, I saw poets as good as Brendan Cleary and Jackie Wills give a free event that attracted a crowd of eight (and two of them left when they realised it wasn’t an open-mic night). And, once, I was part of a reading to which nobody came, a fringe festival event held in the same building as a student production of The Tempest. I waited with two other poets for an audience that never arrived. From time to time someone would put their head round the door and immediately apologise and back away. So the turn out for Sunday’s Crawley Wordfest event was not bad, considering it was mother’s day and all.
The other members of the panel (a grand word for three men sitting by the cash register) were Adam Lowe and Rhys Hughes. We gave brief accounts of our works, had a discussion about the nature of satire (What does it mean? What do we want it to do? Is it what we’re doing?).Which in turn led to a discussion about the impact of satire on politics, and then politics itself. The discussion was necessarily inconclusive – satirical is one of those words that only seems to have a distinct meaning – but the audience joined in eagerly enough. I read from The Noise of Strangers, Rhys, claiming his novel Mister Gum is unsuitable for a family audience, from a short story parodying Hemingway. The whole deal lasted about an hour, followed by a coffee in a local gallery (thanks Jo!) and a replacement bus ride home. The literary life!
