Margate and Canterbury

This charity bookshop with stained glass in Margate used to be a bank - I took the photo from its first floor. "The Margate Bookshop" nearby has an excellent range of poetry books. There are some interesting arty shops and markets in the "Old Town"

It was only when I arrived in Margate that I found out that the Turner Contemporary Gallery's there. This sculpture's dress is in the form of cowrie shells. One of Gormley's statues is nearly visible through the window. It was half-submerged way out at sea when I was there. An old swimmer had just entered the water by it.

Canterbury cashes in on Canterbury Tales (one is set only a mile or so from my house in Cambridge). It's an interesting city to walk around, especially if you like eating and drinking. If you prefer history, there's still more than enough to see. Were I a student again I'd be tempted to go there.

Canterbury too has decent bookshops, including an Oxfam bookshop and the inevitable Chaucer bookshop.

The main point of my trip was to attend "The Sampler" (part of the Canterbury Festival) with Barry Fentiman Hall, Jessica Taggart Rose, Maggie Harris, Katy Evans-Bush, Rosie Johnston, Connor Sansby, Poppy Cockburn and Mat Riches. There were some good poems (my favourite was about the Gormley statue) but I didn't stay to the end because the event looked like it would last 50% longer than I expected. The open-mic readers weren't the only ones with time trouble. Not for the first time, the ones whose introductions went on longest were the ones whose poems I wanted to fast-forward through. In a competition where poems can't be longer than 40 lines, winning poems can be a lot shorter than the maximum allowed. I think the same might apply at open-mics.