As I was updating the website recently, I was reminded of the lovely interview that Andy N Poet did that very Friday. He came to the flat in Manchester where I then lived. On the 3rd of March I had launched a pamphlet and my second collection at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The launch was one of the reasons for the interview. Andy has now done several hundred interviews. You can find them all on Spokenlabel.bandcam.com Here is the link to my interview: SpokenLabel

When I listened to the interview this week, it felt spooky at times. Early February 2020 I had received confirmation of my ‘settled status’. I told Andy that I hoped to spend ‘most of the summer’ in my caravan in The Netherlands, that I couldn’t immediately tell him who my ‘desert island’ poets would be. At one point Andy mentioned the ‘virus’.

Here is a poem about that Friday from Kate Noakes who is our guest poet this month. The poem is from her 2024 Chalking the Pavement published by Broken Sleep Books.

The sick spring

Thirteenth March, a Friday with which comes
a most lauded play, Stoppard’s last contract:
Vienna, and a family succumbs,
fortunes and losses in Leopoldstadt.

I am treated to the stalls by a friend
of a friend, a nice man I do not know.
His cancelled cultural holiday ends
with a short email critique of the show.

I give him scenes, chronology, pictures,
timings avoiding history’s clichés;
how I stepped into busy Leicester Square
with foreboding that hurried me away,

and how I scurried home to a semi-death:
headache, sore throat, cough and struggle for breath.