October Open Mic: 8 October 2026
We had another great Open Mic at Roots Café on Thursday 12 October. It was chaired by Steve Robertson, who was a warm, relaxed and encouraging host.
First up was Ewan Hardie who shared some humorous poems, impressively delivered from memory – poems written when he was somewhat pessimistic about his profession – he’s a pharmacist. The first began ‘I’m a pill dispenser’, the second cleverly explored the metaphor of ‘NHS as Church’, and the final poem (‘It’s a little rude,’ Ewan warned us) was a reminder that even in pharmacies, members of the public are not always polite. It was entitled ‘A battle royale with your local pill-dispenser’.
Next, we heard from Arlo Beveridge who shared (again from memory) an intense, passionate monologue entitled ‘Laugh in the wild’. The speaker, feeling rather negative, had attended a personality workshop to help him see things from a more positive perspective. The glass is not half empty, it’s half full, he was taught. But he’s finding it hard to reform his personality - if you were hit by a bike, he realises, the glass would be shattered and you’d be in hospital.
But though he’s really sick of his personality, and tries really hard to be positive, he remains on the negative side of the mood spectrum. Perhaps he needs to attend more personality workshops? ‘Maybe I’m just paranoid,’ he concludes.
David Goldie offered us three deeply thought and ingenious poems. The first, ‘The words that don’t exist’ itemised concepts which don’t yet have words to describe them – concepts such as ‘the colour of dreams’, ‘thoughts which never occurred but might have’, ‘a rhyme for orange’.
Next David read another word-related poem, ‘The lost words’ offering brief elegies for the words that have been scandalously removed from the Oxford Children’s Dictionary to make room for 21st century coinages. Words like lark, adder, acorn, conker, kingfisher, dandelion – words expressing a sense of attachment to nature and the world. Here’s a couple of these elegies: ‘The adder is erased, rubbed out in zig-zag strokes’; ‘What larks? Now, footnotes from the past. We search the script in vain and find they’re gone.’
Finally we heard lines on a similar them: ‘The end of enchantment’ – which mourned the loss of belief in myths and fairy tales – is a powerful elegy to the old stories which shaped our past.
Next, another of Steve Robertson’s amusing true stories – not about a bus, this time, though he says it was written on a bus! Back in the summer of 2021 he was studying accounting at UHI as a mature student, and decided to get a typical student job during the six-week summer break. ‘Vue to a kill’ describes an incident during his time at Vue cinema, where he was tasked with clearing the rubbish from the various viewing rooms between film screenings.
The brevity of the time assigned for this by someone at head office meant that completing it was a frantic race against time. The story was punctuated by Steve’s fellow labourer, 17-year-old Casey counting down the minutes they have left to complete the task. Finally, breathlessly, ‘With two minutes to spare, we’re done.’
A customer walks in, looks at Steve and opines ‘You should have stayed at school!’ Steve replies ‘It was education that brought me here.’ Whereupon the story concluded with Steve’s laconic observation that the customer then sat down to watch the Peter Rabbit movie!
After the break, we heard first from Colm Black, who read us three short, insightful poems. ‘Google search – not’ made the point that you lose much if you merely google words like ‘transubstantiation’. The poem argues that there is a richness in using a dictionary, and seeing words in their alphabetical context.
‘Legacy – Rijksmuseum Bookshop’ counterpoints a visit to the famous Amsterdam museum , where the bookshop has titles on the Dutch slave trade and the East India Company with the discovery that, in the silt at the bottom of the canals ‘Toxic waste from East India Company ships still lurks’.
Finally, Colm read a reflection on ‘Ranunculus’ – the yellow flower with ‘the gift of identifying butter lovers.’
Lilian Ross read two lovely poems in Doric. The first, ‘Fireside Tales’ shared Lillian’s recollections of hearing wonderful stories about the richness of life from ‘an auld man We aa ken fine’. Young Lillian could never hear enough. The poem concluded:
Tales o an auld man
Telt tae the young,
Cud nivver be matched
Bi anither tongue.
An I wish, oh I wish,
He could be here the nicht!
Tae tell us a story,
bi the duncin fire licht.
Lilian’s second poem was a spirited celebration of the ‘Queen o Dumplins’, ‘oor dandy dumplin in a cloot’.
We heard next from Nadia Johal, who read three poems. The first was ‘Tiny Little Corpses’, a dissection of a woman’s dysfunctional lifestyle –
A little bird, caged by her own stench.
Too many twigs in this nest. Twigs made
Of hardened glass with metal tops.
And those lines ‘Open up that window I say. Take a leap. For this place is not how it was supposed to be.’ – is this an invitation to hope, or to despair?
We next heard ‘Stolen crap’, about a quest for meaning amid disappointments, and the challenges of living after you discover that ‘There never was a point. Never a meaning.’
The poem ends with a flickering of hope:
Steal some shit back and do some dreaming
Any idiot can have a crisis, but can you live day to day
Without crumbling and breaking and letting your joy fade away?
And finally, Nadia read ‘You can’t dance’ , a poem about the hectic, self-destructive lifestyle of someone who can’t dance, or has not learned to dance, who has not realized that life is a dance, not a treadmill.
‘Tiny Little Corpses’ and ‘You Can't Dance’ come from Nadia’s poetry collection titled 'Into the Akashic Field' subtitle 'Vilāpa विलप - The Spoken Lament of the Grieving Soul'. The poems in the collection, Nadia says ‘are about a lost friend and dedicated to her, hence the undertone of mourning’.
The final reader was Malcolm Timperley. The story, ‘Return to sender’ was vintage Timperley – a macabre tale set in a prison health unit where a prisoner is being assessed by a psychiatrist who seems puzzled at how delighted her patient is to be behind bars. The story draws us in, as the psychiatrist draws out the reasons for the prisoner being in this situation. We know there will be a trade-mark twist in the last sentence or two, but nonetheless we are surprised. For inspiration, Malcolm draws on his career as a psychiatrist, and his experience of working with disturbed people serving prison sentences. He has heard many bizarre things along the way, but to weave the captivating narratives which Malcolm constructs demands a very high level of skill.
You can read the piece in the Gossamer Wight anthology ‘Unstable Realities’ – you can download it here for free.
In conclusion, Steve thanked all those who took part in the evening, to the members of the HighlandLIT committee who planned the evening, and also to Rebecca and her team who made us so welcome as always at Roots. And many thanks to Marion Timperley for the lovely photos.
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