And that’s when I punched him. Or tried to. But I slipped on the collection of pistachio shells underneath my chair as I lunged forward and my fist went whistling past his ear. The others restrained me from inflicting further damage upon myself while Toby Salt looked at me with amused contempt, shook his head, then walked out of Poetry Club for ever.

Wednesday August 8th

I looked again at the words I’d fought with yesterday. I’d been attempting to create a more contemporary feel to the whole dying thing:

You are gone from the world. I feel so alone.

My head is a rock. My heart is a stone.

Then I think of that summer, our apartment in Rome.

With me, in your thrall, and you, on your phone.

The motif of the mobile phone would make it play more strongly with Generation X and Millennial audiences, I hoped.

The memories come as if to atone:

A daytrip to see the Millennium Dome,

Long walks on the beach, our feet in the foam.

With love in my heart, and you, on your phone.

But was that wise? If I was honest with myself, the market share of those segments, in death terms, was not nearly as significant as that all-important ageing baby boomer market.

But then came that day, the last you’d have known.

You in the street and a car coming home.

I think you may well have been on your phone.

With me, at the wheel, and the smash of your bones.

The whole business of the poem’s narrator running over their lover was also troubling me. It did not strike me as the stuff of elegies.

Now, on your coffin, we have thrown our last stones.

Sleep soundly, my love, with the worms in the loam.

I pray where you’ve gone is a free Wi-Fi zone.

With you, in the ground, lying next to your phone.

I looked at my own phone from the relative safety of the sofa. There was a message from Liz:

Are you OK?

What a pompous idiot Toby [Salt] is!

Well, you weren’t thinking that in Saffron Walden, when you hung on his every word, I considered retorting, but I am not by nature a mean-spirited or vindictive person. I replied with the rather more conciliatory:

All fine here!

Good riddance to him.

And I was fine, not least because the last laugh was on him. I’d looked up the word he’d used yesterday:

HOPLOPHILIAC (noun): a person who harbours an unnatural love of guns and other firearms

And it just happened to be the solution to 15 across of the crossword.

Thursday August 9th