Southwell Poetry Festival Pub Crawl

To say the now traditional ‘Poetry Pub Crawl’ part of the Southwell Poetry Festival is a little odd is akin to saying that the Titanic disaster was a bit of a boating mishap. I was approached to ‘lead’ the event by festival stalwart, organizer and my favourite librarian, Sheelagh Gallagher - ‘lead’ being a strange choice of words, as I am clearly the only one out of the twenty or so folks that have turned up on this muggy summer evening who has no clue where he is going.

‘I suppose you think I’m going to tell you how the evening will proceed,’ says Sheelagh.

‘Yes,’ I answer naively.

By the time we reach the Wheatsheaf, a very pleasant looking pub - the kind of pub you wish your dad had taken you to as a kid, instead of the scary looking working mens' clubs of the 70s - it is clear, thankfully, that no one else knows what is supposed to happen either.

Safe in the knowledge that I am being given carte-blanche to completely mess things up, I kick the night off with a quick performance/reading, then open up the floor to the other poetry pub-crawlers. We are treated to new and original pieces of varying quality and subject matter. Trees are mentioned (a lot), as are boats, ice creams and autumn skies.  I lower the heady tone by talking about superheroes; later I lower the tone even further by threatening to take my clothes off.

At our next stop – The Admiral Rodney - we are packed off into the backroom of the bar; these strange poets are clearly not to be trusted with the normal populace. On the plus side, we pick up a couple more crawlers. These include a rather inebriated Glaswegian, and a young teen who brings the house down with his ‘mobile phone’ reading of a Tim Minchen poem. Then, having frightened off at least one local, the evening takes on a more sombre note. ‘Loss’ becomes the theme of the minute, Ted Hughes is thrown in - as is Wendy Cope -  and the incredibly depressing (though brilliant) Poem by Simon Armitage (who performed in Southwell Minster at the start of the festival).

At The Crown, largely due to the amount of real ales consumed, spirits lift and the evening takes on a happier (if slightly more slurred) atmosphere. Somewhere along the way -  I’m not quite sure where - we are joined by minor TV celeb James ‘The Taxi Driver Poet’ and he treats us all to his sharply written and performed ditties and limericks about love, relationships, and inner city motoring. Sadly, the annoyingly loud extractor fan drowns out most of the less ‘mouthy’ poets - our standing in the rural community has dropped so much that we have been banished outside.

Giving up The Crown as a bad job, we stagger up the long and increasingly darker streets towards our last stop, The Hearty Goodfellow. We are integrated this time with the pub’s clientele, who are either lovers of poetry or simply too drunk to run away. By 10.40pm though, having run out of poems to read and money for booze, I pour myself into the passenger seat of the wife’s car and fall asleep on the drive back to Forest Fields.

I dream of stanzas served with ice and a splash of tonic, sonnets lined up behind the bar, squeezed out from optics of love and loss, and pints spilled carelessly over rhyming couplets and neatly written words. Tomorrow I will wake up smiling.

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