Poetry Breakfast, January 2026

Matt Eccles and Jay Lewis

I won’t go into this one. I will let Jay Lewis’s photos tell the story. It was an occasion of paramount excellence. The first half, the ‘A-side’ as Jay put it, had a preponderance of humorists of whom Matt (shown in the photo above) was laughs-in-chief, and Mike Alma’s dialogue based on the song Paddy McGinty’s Goat, performed with Jay, drew equal mirth, as did Mogs while of course there was our bedrock, Stacey. Among other performers Lindsey, Canadian yet seeming quite settled in her new home of Dudley, gave a riveting reading of her sharp poem. I won’t say that the B-side struck a more sombre note – there was Annette’s lovely verse account of how she built a friendly relationship with a spider – but the theme after all was time, and both Elaine and Amanda delivered on very different ways of dealing with past events.

But let the pictures speak for themselves.