“Michael and Hattie were insinuating subconscious atrocities at each other across the breakfast table when they heard the sound of debris screaming down the chimneystack. Plumes of ash escaped from the fireplace and engulfed them in a domestic 9/11,” the reader begins.

     Amongst the audience his opening words are digested and absorbed:

     ‘I idolise his pants,’ thinks the poached-egg-breast woman at the front: ‘and I especially like the way he dips and sways his crotch when he mouths “plumes of ash”’

     But sometimes the work is unappreciated, undigested:

     ‘I can do better than that shit,’ thinks the lightly bearded bohemian type. ‘It’s so fucking do-mestic!’

The reader continues: “Hattie under ash looked like a burnt soldier in the dying fire of the trenches, reflected Michael.”

     The clink of a wine glass from a new arrival into the room momentarily inhibits the writer’s flow, and fleetingly takes the poached-egg-breast woman’s attention away from the reader and down to the shopping bag nestled at her feet: a small bottle of vodka waiting to be opened and emptied.

     A Hoxton small hat frantically scribbles his own thoughts, word bebop, live writing’s scat reaction to the reader’s own words: ‘atrocities, precocities, velocities: word ash under her belly made her look like George Melly . . . ’

     “Michael’s tongue entered her smoking vulva as if he was searching in a volcano for something to say,” intones
the reader.