[Nigel Mace]

On Sunday 30th April, we were lucky enough to attend Tony Harrison's 80th Brithday reading at Salt's Mill in Saltaire.

The venue was what, in the Borders, we'd call "stowed out" with around 300 people from life-long friends to huge numbers of young fans - a real clamjamfrey of locals from all around urban West Yorkshire. He read with caustic wit and understated sensitivty and with an articulation that ranged from the penetratingly crisp, through a variety of tones, to the broadest of his original Leeds accent. From the pungency of "Them & (uz)" to the searing intelligence of the passage on the Marsyas myth from his play "The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus" (with which the evening ended) and all points in between, it was a tour de force, greeted with huge enthusiasm by an audience which queued for hours afterwards to purchase stacks of his books, all of which he patiently signed.

I felt very lucky indeed to have been present and well cured of the reserve I've, in some past times, harboured about his work - which read and reread since, bulks the larger and the prouder for the experience.