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Welcome to Newsletter #73

A bunch of tales I wanted to share with you

A tale I read

Toilet Troubles by Amy McAllister

A tale I heard

Actor, comedian, poet Tim Key on attempting observational comedy 10 times at the start of his career:

“One was good, three were OK, five were very, very bad, and one was utterly terrible. I could just hear people eating crisps at that one. They were even too pitying to heckle.

I’d been writing some poems on the tube. Jokes, really, but they just looked like poems when I wrote them down, so I performed them. I wore a suit, which I’d never done before, I put some Russian lounge music on, carried a can of Red Stripe and read the poems from cards.

I would never have considered becoming a comedian when I was a student. They were people like Frank Skinner and Jack Dee. I couldn’t even entertain the idea, but in that first poetry gig it sort of clicked.”

A tale I saw

That's Just The Way It Is (Things Will Never Be The Same) by Bohdan Piasecki

A tale I wrote

We're more alike than I realised.
I cry at the X-Factor sob stories too.
I can't eat my dinner when Casualty is on
and my wife is the reason I'm alive.

When I sit on my London sofa
I can feel its Swindon cousin cuddling my bones
(bones that squeak as loudly as yours).

My hands have graduated from side plates to dinner plates
and I can't wait for them to play home to a homemade meal.
We're more alike than I realised -
I don't know what I'm doing either
but I'm trying.

A tail I like

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