Sunday, May 28, 2017

Robert Sheppard: Diary entries. Poems about the Belvedere pub Liverpool

Friday: I still couldn’t get on the Teachers’ Pension Website but I decided to resign anyway. Via email and then up to Ormskirk to tender my resignation physically, hard copy. Which I did. A brief conversation with A and then back to L’pool. To the Belve. With P.

All hell broke loose. B turned up from Malta. C fell over and cut his head and had to be taken away by paramedics. D and E on their way to see John Cale. We talked to a drunken engineer called F. An average day in the Belvedere. Pizza Express with P. Can’t remember a bloody thing.

Saturday: Woke up to find Ranjit Hoskote’s poem about the Belve online. It’s here. And mine is the third one down in Molly Bloom here. But then there’s still Chris McCabe’s poem about another such memorable afternoon in the pub, which exists on paper and as a video for the Sheppard Symposium. I can envisage a mini-anthology.
(⚠Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be time to reflect on momentous decisions. (It's tucked away in this post here too. Also based on a diary entry. A busy week, and a horrible one too, with the atrocity in Manchester.) I’ve always said my diary was trenchantly non-literary. This proves it. The big Number 6 question, ‘Why did you resign?’ remains unasked, unanswered. Have a drink.)