***

Ahhh back in the day when poetry was the new rock'n'roll and we sold poetry in broadsheets from pub to pub and all piled into an auld van and headed down the highway to the southern counties and turn up at a local radio station and proclaim ourselves in poetry so that that night people would be enticed into readings at arts centres and the like...those be de days. A mechanic who" didn't give a toss about poetry" and underneath a car tinkering with its thingymabob heard me reading my "nightdress poem" on the radio and came along to hear me read it...he was very put out when I didn't and then I had to read it then and there on the pavement and he went away satisfied.

One of my best performances and one of my best audiences.

Ah I was only a young guy( relatively )then and had just become Ireland's First Poet in Residence in a Secondary School in Ireland in a school called St. Killian's in Bray.

This must be '84 or'85 as in '86 I took the boat to Land of the Angles and ensconced me self there for the better or the worst of it.