Just an ordinary working day

Today I:

• went swimming.


• went to the dentist for a check-up (mostly good, but a chipped filling will need re-doing.


• visited a brewery.


• helped deliver a car-load of dead computers, monitors and keyboards to the recycling centre on Teesside.

Through the oval window

• since we were nearby, went to admire the Middlesbrough transporter bridge - not in operation because of high winds, but still an impressive structure.

• nosed around the Bottle of Notes sculpture in the centre of town, and, in the quarter hour before closing time, dipped a toe into the new Institute of Modern Art - the current exhibition looks at the survival of drawing with works by Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, among others.


• headed off to the new Borders in the retail park, with time for a coffee before the poetry event: the shop has an enthusiastic manager, who actually stocks poetry from local presses, and had set up a microphone and a few seats just below the staircase, so that visitors to the shop could pass by without disturbing the readers, but could pause and listen without feeling they were committing themselves to anything! My favourites of the readers were Ellen Phethean (I am looking forward to reading her novel-in-poems, Wall) and Andy Croft, with a selection of poems from Not Just a Game, an anthology of poems about sport which he co-edited. His rendering of Betjeman's A Subaltern's Love Song was worth the trip on its own.