Vona Groarke, whose second collection of verse, Poems About Houses, is due from Gallery Press this autumn and who has two very fine poems in the new edition of Poetry Ireland Review, tells me about a reading that Seamus Heaney will be giving next Friday in Dundalk.
Vona, who lives in the town and has organised the reading, is delighted at the prospect of the Nobel laureate's visit and wishes to inform anyone who may not already know about it that it will take place in Dundalk Town Hall at 8pm. Admission is a mere £6.
Incidentally, while I'm on the subject of Poetry Ireland Review, you'll find a loose slip in the latest edition featuring a photograph of a football match and an invitation to spot the ball and thereby win a set of limited edition Poetry Ireland pamphlets.
What on earth is going on? Well, you see, outgoing guest editor Frank Ormsby had invited some poetry and prose on the subject of sport, and the results take up the first section of the current issue, with Michael Longley reminiscing about schools rugby, Gerald Dawe getting dewy-eyed about a soccer childhood and Conor O'Callaghan being slightly smutty (or is that just my dirty mind?) about snooker.
That's not all. Bernard O'Donoghue celebrates hurling south and east of Connacht, Theo Dorgan swears he once saw Cuchulainn playing for the Glen (no, really), Gabriel Fitzmaurice wings by with a philosophical sonnet on the game of life, while Sean O'Brien outdoes them all by waxing lyrical on such diverse sporting endeavours as tennis, cricket, football and the Olympic Games.
Ye gods, what next? A poem a day in the sports pages of the Star, perhaps . . .
Write what you know. That's what teachers are always telling their pupils, and that's obviously what whoever taught Tony Parsons told him.
Before he found latter-day fame as an all-purpose media pundit (BBC2's Late Review, every newspaper and magazine you care to pick up), Tony, you will recall, used to work as a rock journalist on New Musical Express, where he met and married another young rock journalist, Julie Burchill.
After some time and amid much publicity, the marriage ended and Tony was left literally holding the baby. Now he's in the midst of writing a novel, Man and Boy. Its subject? A media pundit whose marriage ends and who is left holding the baby.
HarperCollins are so excited by what they've seen of the book that they've given Tony "a very substantial sum" to finish it.
Meanwhile, ex-wife Julie, whose tedious memoirs have just been published to ridiculous media hype, is also at work on a novel. This is to be called Married Alive, and for all I know it may concern a woman who is a media pundit and who leaves her husband holding the baby.
Hurry while stocks last. Books Upstairs on College Green are currently having what they describe as their biggest-ever sale, with lots of interesting volumes on offer.
For instance, I came across a handsome paperback edition from New York's Ecco Press of Ford Madox Ford's 1911 collection of essays, Memories and Impressions, which I immediately snapped up for £4.99. From the same publisher, Chekhov's short stories in Constance Garnett's translations were equally inviting, but they ran to ten volumes and I simply couldn't carry them.
A handsome large-format paperback of Donleavy's The Ginger Man was also worth acquiring, while hundreds of Virago titles were available at a trifling £2.50 each. They probably still are, and I'm sure there are also a few copies left of the Secker & Warburg paperback edition of Orwell's Collected Essays, which Books Upstairs have been selling for £5.99.
Clem Cairns tells me that the latest Fish short story competition attracted more than a thousand entries, coming from such diverse places as Zambia, Brazil, South Africa, India, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - as well, of course, as from nearer ho me.
"It's especially interesting," Clem observes, "that stories are coming from the native people of those countries, as well as coming from the so-called Irish diaspora."
But he confesses himself "particularly disappointed" that over the last couple of years not many stories have reached him from Northern Ireland. He doesn't have a theory about this, and nor, I'm afraid, do I - perhaps they're all too busy up there writing poetry.
Anyway, after due deliberation and judging, the very best of the submissions will find their way into the next Fish anthology. In the meantime, you can get the current one, Dog Days and Other Stories, in most bookshops. There are some fine stories in it.