No Dylan today. He was going to see Stuart compete in an iron man triathlon. Ugandan cleft-lip and palate sufferers. I confess to feeling rather let down by this: we have so very few Saturdays left. For him to spend one of them in the company of that serial overachiever rather than me (a cereal over-eater) is hard to stomach. He had been doing so well, too.

I buried myself in the Saturday newspaper as distraction. I was reading yet another article about This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave and how well it was selling when I was struck by a sudden notion: perhaps, in a similar fashion to how he felt threatened by my verse, Toby Salt in turn had his own rival in the poetry world, someone upset by his own rise to prominence.

A faint memory stirred of Sefton Warbrick’s recent review. I quickly found the section I wanted:

“And it may be time for Bramwell Price to step down – as gracefully as he can – from the stage. For we have a new Il Divo waiting in its wing, and his name is Toby Salt.”

Bramwell Price. For many years considered the enfant terrible of British poetry. A man famed as much for his violent temper and petty feuding as for his verse. Just the kind of poet to take umbrage at Toby Salt’s inexorable rise. I checked online. He was giving a reading next Thursday. There were plenty of tickets still available.

Sunday November 4th

I continued with my research. It seems that there had been literary fireworks between Bramwell Price and Toby Salt. Toby Salt had reviewed Price’s latest collection Spunk in one of the broadsheets and absolutely panned it:

Price’s continued efforts to shock us – while entertaining enough, perhaps, back in the early 90s – now seem nothing more than a puerile cry for attention, a desperate plea of relevance to an audience, who have long since moved on. It seems the enfant terrible grew up to be nothing but an enfant ennui.

Bramwell Price responded in typical fashion in the following week’s letters column:

‘Toby Salt is a twat,’ he wrote laconically.

I must admit I rather like the sound of this Bramwell Price.

Monday November 5th

The Bonfire

As I warmed myself by its fire,

I noticed on that burning pyre

a poem of mine, long since penned,

now in flame from end to end

and next to it, another one,

the words alight and quickly gone,

its rhymes and rhythms up in flame,

just like the letters of my name.

Only then did it dawn on me,

the whole thing was my poetry,

a blazing bonfire of bon mots,

all my writing up in smoke.

More and more got thrown upon it:

haiku, villanelles and sonnets.

The people’s faces overjoyed

to see my work at last destroyed.

They hoisted up an effigy,

which turned out to be really me,

lighting up the evening sky.