Congratulations, Stevie. You really are at the height of your writing powers! Well, don't mention it (no really, DON'T MENTION IT).

And thanks to all who inspired me: Julie Burchill, Mary Kenny, Carol Shields, Michel Houllebecq, JD Salinger, Billy Collins, Wallace Stevens, St Paul, Ethan Canin – humans who've proved that writing matters profoundly.

Plus all my years as a newspaper colum...

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By 5.45pm on a bitterly-cold day recently, following a call to the car mechanic, I'd had enough. Nothing was going right. Not the three new poems I was working on.  Not my car. Nothing.

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Had a long dark night of the soul last night as I worked to extend my epic poem 'Thirteen Weeks of Gut-Wrenching Misery in Goole'.

The poem in its original form and length (259 lines) is published in the internationally-acclaimed literary mag The Scunny Onion – supported by Scunthorpe Council.

Last night I added sequences based on my time in Hull, and a prologue about my vile experience...

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Muse-soaked, ark-worthy poets from the north-west of England will this evening prepare to carry their words to the end of the peninsula and there join the assembly of the BARDS in New Brighton, by the holy river.

And all around our territory the ineffable spirit will hover above the surface of the deep - in profound benediction for the flourishing of art through all the bad times.

I KNO...

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Sadly, I can’t be at the BARDS poetry in New Brighton, Wirral (Magazine pub, Magazine Row, CH45 1HP) this Monday,10 September. Work commitments, you see …

But now my pal Julie Goodyear has been ejected from the BB house, I’ve asked her to attend instead of me. I think you’ll agree she is my equal in terms of pulchritude and eloquence.

If she can’t make it, well don’t worry; there are pl...

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I do hope Julie Goodyear isn’t voted off Celebrity Big Brother. Without her the show would not be worth watching.

I fear she may be voted off, however, not least because most of the people who ring the Channel 5 phonelines are … well … young and a bit thick.

Sorry if that seems cruel, but the type of people who regard the rapper MC Harvey and the US actor ‘The Situation’ as celebritie...

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