Dear Shed Friends,
I am writing with news that You Took the Last Bus Home will soon be with you. I have now encountered it in real life and it really is a thing of beauty. It’s got the lot: striking cover art, French flaps, endpapers, one of those little ribbony things to use as a bookmark. It’s like a thing from the Golden Age of Publishing (whenever that was).
As I now have my copies, yours will be sent out in the next couple of weeks. It is due to be piled high in bookshops from 6th October. That edition will also be an objet d’art but not quite as swanky as the edition that you’ll be receiving; you have earned the deluxe version - as without you, this whole project would not have happened.
By the way, something to listen out for if you’re not too busy watching The Great British Bake Off this week is that I’ll be on Four Thought on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday 7th at 8.45 talking about the relationship between poetry and social media, and particularly my own experience of it all. Like an X Factor contestant, I have been on a ‘journey’. More information can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07tbj8d
And I promised you all a supporters-only poem. So here is such a thing. Unsurprisingly, it has the shed at its heart.
The Palace of Broken Flowerpots
Not a bottle of wine or box of chocolates.
Share with me instead,
this shed,
this palace of broken flowerpots
and blunted shears.
We shall sit
upon wine-box thrones,
talking of the weather
and the career of Britney Spears.
We shall contemplate
the implements –
the rake, the spade,
the hoe -
that we always plan to use
but somehow never do.
How expectantly
they dangle so!
And this mower
might be our chariot,
these mice,
our humble courtiers,
see them
quartered in the hollows
of four fold-up
garden chairs.
These compost bags
shall be our bed,
and this life
a kind of truth,
star-gazing
through the holes
in our punctured
palace roof.
Brian
x