Sunday night was epic in many, many ways. You all know about our obsession with the Overground at Arachne, well, what happens when it isn’t working is hell on wheels. Shoreditch instead of being a 20 minute book read away, is an hour and a bit two buses and a half hour standing about and bus drivers not stopping at the bus stop even though you ring the bell… and that was just getting there…

Not withstanding the bad temper we arrived in, we thoroughly enjoyed the eclectic event, High spots Bobbie Darbyshire reading her Something Missing from Lovers’ Lies, Megan Beech’s high-speed slam poetry, Camila Fiori’s rather distressing poems about her mother, Julie Mayhew’s witty reading from her novel Red Ink ( I bought a copy and have been reading it – on the Overground, of course) Charlie Dupre’s bonkers imagining of Kit Marlow and William Shakespeare (ShakeyP) as duelling playground MCs, and Eliza Shaddad’s rendition of In the Month of January, a favourite song of mine, which is the most atypical folk song, in that although it has the traditional girl gets pregnant boy goes off with someone else, parents chuck her out story-line,  there’s no chorus, no repeats, and the tune is this haunting uncertain little thing just like a cold wind.