It being one of those uncommonly pleasant and sunny English days, I decided to take myself off upon a train journey. The destination was irrelevant; what counted was the time to sit and reflect, to watch the countryside rattle by from the window of my three-quarters-empty train.

Two and a half unwonten hours later, I got off in search of air. The station was called ‘Audley End’ and seemed as good a place of disembarkation as any other. It was only having strolled to the end of the platform and read the poster pinned to the white lattice fence that I recalled the station was but a short stroll to Saffron Walden where, it appeared, a Poetry Festival was about to begin. What a stroke of luck! I’d forgotten all about this event, but there were some excellent poets on the bill (as well as some awful, pretentious ones).

I checked into the hotel on the high street and unpacked the clean shirt and cardigan that I’d carefully folded and placed in my suitcase last night, hanging them in the wardrobe to prevent further crumpling.

Monday July 2nd

Saffron Hall was busier than I’d imagined. Some ticketing issue with one of the more interesting, popular poets, I supposed, had meant that festival visitors had been given some free tickets to Toby Salt’s talk instead. I squeezed in at the back of the auditorium, hidden beneath my balaclava.

A rather weaselly man with a goatee beard and nasal condition introduced Toby Salt. This was Django, editor and owner of Shooting from the Hip. He described Toby Salt as ‘one of this country’s finest poets’. I was thankful that my balaclava muffled my laughter.

Toby Salt began, as he invariably does, with a Petrarchan sonnet. It concerned itself with human fragility and the restorative power of Lake Como. I concerned myself with the crossword which I had brought with me to fill just such moments of tedium. I fished out my dictionary to check my answer to 17 down:

NUDNIK (noun): a tiring, dull or boring person.

As I was pencilling it in, I noticed that the rest of the audience, rather than staring embarrassedly at their shoes or gazing blankly into the mid-distance, appeared to be actually enjoying this stuff. A lengthy exploration in free verse on the nature of hermeneutics was greeted with a ripple of warm applause. There were gasps and strangled cries at his graphic retelling of the story of the Rape of the Sabine Women. Selected readings from his advance proof copy of This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave, which he shook in the air like a TV evangelist, provoked tears, laughter, melancholic reflection and a thunderous response from the audience.