I could sense the rest of the group eyeing me with interest. It was then that I realised I was still applauding when everyone else had stopped some time ago. A minute or so had passed since Liz had sat down from performing a new poem she’d written entitled ‘Mansplaining at the Ghostbusters Training Academy for Women’:

Well, love, it looks like you’ve got a shape-shifter

there, tricky buggers them, please excuse my French.

You’ll need your photon gun and a monkey wrench,

if you’ve got one to hand. Watch as you lift the

neutrona wand, love, valuable that is. Good

stuff. Now, there’s a cyclotron in that backpack,

not that your pretty head should worry about that.

It’s to concentrate the protons, see. That should

create a positronic ionized stream

to polarize with the negative charges

of the ectoplasm. Still with me, darling?

Lovely. Wait ’til you hear the shape-shifter scream . . .

There. He’s not going anywhere! Now, love, just

pop him right inside this Muon Trap. Double-

check he’s secure. We don’t want any more trouble

from the likes of him! There, you did it! You must

be exhausted. I didn’t think you’d stick it,

not at first. It’s tiring work – even for men.

A lot of women wouldn’t have it in them.

A cuppa’s what you need to sort you out. Biscuit?

She’d recited it in a mock-cockney voice, delivered with all the condescension of a garage mechanic confident of fleecing a customer for an extra monkey through an assumed superior knowledge of camburettors or whatever it is they’re called. And yet, in spite of this, she made the poem seem sexy somehow – particularly the line ‘pop him right inside this Muon Trap’. It was a most intriguing performance and one that I was determined to ponder some more at length when I got home.

As I got up to read a few poems, I could hear Toby Salt defining the term ‘mansplaining’ to Chandrima although I could tell by the look on her face that she knew this already. Liz appeared to like my poems, too. She laughed in all the right places (there were two) and then smiled at me as I sat down. I fear I may have blushed in response.

What’s more, she demonstrated a healthy aloofness towards Toby Salt and his latest posturings. He gave us a preview of a terza rima he’d written for the Saffron Walden Poetry Festival entitled ‘Bucchero Redux’, about the socio-cultural history of an ancient Etruscan pot. This pantomime of pretentiousness was greeted by Liz with rolled eyes and arched eyebrows; although, admittedly, they may well have been directed at my wayward flicking of pistachio shells, a number of which had inadvertently landed in the folds of her dress.