If he was sixty then he didn’t show it

in his face or the handshake

that he offered me at the end

of the night,

the long arduous session

in which my curry sauce,

Newcastle fashion, served with Barbados

and Middlesborough grin

and Southport decay,

tasted oh so fine as the last vestige

of the night died in my horse driven

carriage, snorting wildly throat.

After a quarter of a century,

the odd excursion to the land

of History in the making,

still that beguiling man