I HATE Italo Calvino.

Anyway, it's cold... it's colder than a politician's heart, it's so cold that the local flasher was caught describing himself to women, it was so cold the lawyers had their hands in their own pockets... etc, etc...

We were not expecting many people but five hardy souls turned up, including a new poet. The poet had spoken about how he had tried various other writers' groups, so when he read out, instead of being really nice and positive as even the most acid-tongued of are when a new person reads out for the first time, we had to make sure that our feedback was more insightful that whatever he had from other groups - so we gave it to him. We hope he comes back!

So there was poetry from the new member and only one other piece of prose, but we read, listened and vivisected til 9.20pm.

After the pub, this happened:

Last night we had a free style beat poem, an empty shampoo bottle, some exquisite ballet dancing and an extremely unusual school, and free sandwiches in the pub. Excellent start to the year I'd say.

We kicked off 2012 with an all female group, although before we started there were some pithy comments via his mobile from Bilal about the submissions for his online book ( stand by for feedback folks - or should that be, take cover)

We heard further extracts from Mary and Lily's books both of which are excellent and bode well for the standard of writing in 2012 and then we went down the pub. Within minutes of us arriving, the pub was compeletely deserted - was it something we said?

Mary is off to her editing course, which unfortunately clashes with wgwg so we won't be seeing her for a while. We wish her well for the course - we will miss you Mary, don't forget to come back to us!

Next meeting January 19th - see you there.

There were only 5 of us, but the four readings and feedback took nearly the whole two hours. It was good to be able to delve deeply.

The first session in 2012 is 5 Jan. Have a good Xmas and happy new year and all that jazz...

So, our dastardly plan has worked, we know that because twelve people turned up on Thursday night, proving that absence makes the heart grow fonder eh? A great night ensued, there was so much good work read out, and Lily is back - Hurrah! That was a good night people.

An unexpectedly good evening (most of the regulars had said they would not be able to make it, so I did not have high hopes).

I guess that I was the only member of that rarest of minorities, a Londoner (although, in my heart, I don't even think of myself as British); we had three women from the US, a S African dude and our resident Irishman.

Mary's novel is going from strength to strength, but thank god I managed to not like 2 sentences...

See y'all in a fortnight...