Happy belated National Poetry Day!

I'm always saying I'm going to read Miss Baroque's books when she finishes with them, but of course I never do. And I don't care, because now I've found something first.

I've just read this quirky and utterly charming thing. The Scottish Poetry Library commissioned the poet Gerry Cambridge to write a blog last week, around National Poetry Day, which was last Thursday. The blog was aimed at schoolkids, who could and did post questions for the poet to answer. Ms Baroque was otherwise engaged on the day (though she did go and buy Robin Robertson's Swithering, and also had a visitation from Charles Lamb - maybe not such bad going after all), so only caught up with it today (and was late for work as a result; thank you, Scottish Poetry Library!).

It's vivid stuff. The descriptions are gripping, for example of Cambridge's twenty years living in a remote caravan with no car (he loves umbrellas; and, I should think, eiderdowns) and a stunned vole that let him pick it up off the path and take it in by the gas fire.

There's a lot about poetry here, as there certainly should be - and, as with poetry itself, there is also a lot about life. This is what kids deserve. I can imagine loving this when I was a child (though admittedly I'd have preferred it if there were a girl in the story, possibly cooking dinner in the croft in a long dress while the old man was out trying to find her a mother in his tragic, misguided way), and my inner eight-year-old thinks you might like to read the rest of it.

Here's a partial transcript of a radio interview quoted in the blog:

"Do you have a funny or a quirky poem you could read to us?"

"It's a choice between a Shore Crab talking like a Glasgow hardman, or an old crofter whose main regret in life was that he hadn't got married, and who used to get drunk and go out on his tractor looking for women."

"The old crofter, please."

I read my poem 'The Drunken Lyricist', a sonnet. It is about an old crofter called Tom Mackay whom I've written about elsewhere, especially in my first book of poems, The Shell House. I got quite close to him when I spent a couple of summers on Papa Westray, where he lived. He stayed in a hovel down on the shore. It was a caravan with breeze blocks built all round it.

"Oh, that's a sad poem," Susan Morrison said. She's right, though most folk who hear it seem mainly to see the funny side of it. "I hope he found his woman in the end?"

"He didn't, I'm afraid," I said. "He died in his bed in 1997, and a friend sent me a clipping written by the former Herald journalist Jim Hewitson about how he'd been found by another islander, and how his best friend and drinking partner had been lost at sea within hours of Tom dying – so neither knew of the death of the other.