Hornets, dry cleaning and darkrooms

Last night's Polari provided some interesting interpretations on the theme of South London. Paul Burston was suitably "Brixton-blinged up", with his baggies on and his Calvins showing (that man always struggles to keep his clothes on!), and, once the room (largely full of non-Polari-ites who left after the happy hour) was silenced, introduced our first reader William Eaves.



Will read a few pieces from his varied work, starting with an interesting piece from his as yet unpublished new book featuring a dysfunctional family encountering hornets in their holiday chateau in France. As he said, "Very very South London"(!)

He followed this with a very funny pastiche of an insipid magazine profile from his recent acclaimed work Nothing To Be Afraid Of, in which the lead characters are a pair of thespian sisters. The more pretentious of the two, Martha, is asked by a magazine for an insight into the busy life she has led since she took on the part of Miranda in The Tempest:

"It's a gruelling schedule, which means I have to get the eating right: orange juice, cereal, toast and honey in the morning, a sandwich at lunchtime and something else before the show. Miranda can easily come across as a milksop, but I'm trying to be more hardline about her, so it's lots of hearty food and fresh air. The riverside walk from the Design Museum to Hungerford Bridge is one of my favourites, and you can grab a crab salad and some Orvieto along the way."

Apparently Will was inspired by reading one of the "60 second interviews" in The Metro, and it is so true - how many times do you read this kind of drivel in a free paper or "lifestyle magazine"?



After the break, it was the turn of one of our Polari favourites, the lovely Stella Duffy. She opened with a hilarious poem, oddly titled I don't write poetry. All became clear as it turns out it is all about mistaken identity. For many people (and shamefully, The Guardian newspaper) our Stella is interchangeable with fellow lesbian, the Poet Laureate, with whom she shares a surname. (Hence the line "No, I don't write poetry. That's Carol-Ann.")

She informed us that she was tempted to read from her new book Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore (set in Istanbul), but - like Will's earlier piece - considered that would be "too far South London". Instead she treated us to a couple of extracts from the Orange Prize-nominated Room of Lost Things, set in Loughborough Junction (between Camberwell and Brixton apparently).

A tangled web of relationships, the book centres around (of all things) a dry-cleaners. Why a dry-cleaners, you ask? But the penny soon drops when we discover the insights that Robert, who runs the business, gains about people - the little pieces of people's lives that arrive in the pockets of garments, the secrets they contain. The dry cleaners is the "room of lost things" of the title. The two passages she read were so beautifully observed and fascinating that both John-John and I just had to buy copies of the book, which Stella kindly signed.

Paul, concluding the evening's entertainment, asked the audience whether he should lower the tone, to which Stella responded, "shall I start? I can say "Cunt" at the top of my voice if you like...". We love her. Unfazed, he treated us to particularly sordid and smutty extract from Shameless, set in one of the sleazier clubs in Vauxhall. I, for one, will never leave my pint on the bar beneath a walkway full of cruising leather queens - talk about a creamy head...

Another fab evening, we chatted to friends including Rupert Smith and his pal (whose name I forget), author Alan Hollinghurst, and the lovely Frasier from Foyles bookshop, and were overjoyed to learn that January's Polari will be moving from the gorgeous Concrete Bar to a different venue within the South Bank complex - hooray! I look forward to it...

Polari