Perfect prose from poet Pam

12:12pm Friday 19th October 2007

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IT'S not often you'll find the names Pam Ayres and Bruce Springsteen in the same sentence, but last Friday saw the former's poem Do You Think Bruce Springsteen Would Fancy Me? raise one of the biggest laughs of an evening full of them at the Courtyard.

Not much escapes Pam's pen - from global warming to dental care - all cunningly crafted for maximum laughs, and it's her deadly accurate observations which push all the right buttons. Her closing poem, They Should Have Asked My Husband, the spouse in question being a self-appointed authority on everything, is classic Ayres - spot-on, slightly wicked and laugh-out loud funny.

"Yes they should have asked my husband, he can sort out any mess; He can rejuvenate the railways, he can cure the NHS; So any little niggle, anything you want to know; Just run it past my husband, wind him up and let him go."

Along the way, we were treated to the side-splitting story of the family's adopted dog and its encounter with a cream cake, a poem entitled Don't Start, which clearly struck a chord with everyone who ever had a toddler, and throughout the evening, she mined the rich seam of ageing, musing on the need for glasses, her own battle with contact lenses and reciting the ever-popular I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth, all interspersed with comic anecdotes from life in the Cotswolds chez Ayres.

But what makes an evening with Pam Ayres such a joy is her very obvious engagement with the audience, her warmth and her own infections laughter as she shares verse and stories.