Niggled by doubts

Lorraine up and off again. Me sipping the tea Lorraine brought me before springing up and working on a few agency bits this morning, and standing in the kitchen practising some poems, in a last minute attempt to get myself ready for this evening. Managed to leave home late, then the train I caught up to London was delayed, however I made it to the Poetry Cafe just in time, but feeling stressed. Siegfried Baber had come up from Bath, he's becoming a more relaxed rand confident reader. Also Kitty Coles, who I'd not met before but whose poetry I liked, dealing with mythology and quite psychological. Our main reader was Jack Underwood, who is a Faber poet, and therefore accomplished and original. I followed that, but it was a day when I was niggled by doubts about my own work and had the sense that by the time it came to me I was a bit of an unappetising pudding, and I felt I read to stony faces. Robin said I held my own.

A quick drink in the pub afterwards with Robin and another poet called Hilaire. A swifty in there, but we had to make off just as Jack arrived. Then Robin and I jumped into a cab that for £15 took us a few hundred yards in a gridlock. Scrambled out on the Strand and tubed it to Victoria. We got the dividing train together, which took Robin to Eastbourne and me to Preston Park. Lorraine in bed when I got home, and having not eaten I had a bite of bread and cheese and watched an episode of Family Guy before I went to bed at 1 o'clock.