On Friday evening, I went to see Roger McGough and Brian Patten perform their poetry at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank. I went on my own, which is something I’m no longer averse to doing if nobody I know is interested in going to something, but still I am not comfortable in my own skin. I’m more likely to spend £3.50 on a plastic cup of wine so that I have something to do with my hands, rather than just going to stand outside, looking out at the river.

I remember Roger McGough as a nonsense poet, although this is not entirely accurate. As a child I knew him as a poet whose work revolved around witty puns – Grace Darling / grey starling; a potato clock / up at eight o’clock, etc. Brian Patten first came into my consciousness when I was seventeen or eighteen, and he opened my school’s new library. I had too much homework to do that night so I did not attend the opening. I think this probably reflects more on my attitude than on that of my school, and I have since learned (in a manner fitting of Patten’s own stance) that doing all your homework is not necessarily the best way of educating yourself.

It was the largest scale poetry event I can remember attending, and I wondered as I watched the other people filing in whether, like me, they were more familiar with the names of these poets than with their work. In retrospect I think this was a little naïve – I was not alive in the 1960s, so did not experience the poetry buzz created by the Liverpool poets McGough, Patten and Adrian Henri. But the applause that met their appearance onstage – before a single line of verse had been uttered – provided a clue as to the personal feelings associated with these poets.

I always find it difficult listening to live poetry. Perhaps I listen in the wrong way – semantically, trying to take everything in rather than listening for aural pleasure, capturing the overall sensation and letting the details slip. My main feeling at the end of tonight’s performance is of wanting to know more – I will buy these poets’ celebrated anthology, The Mersey Sound; I Googled their names as soon as I got home. It felt a little like going to see a band like The Rolling Stones – there was a sense of history here, of which I have not been a witness. There was reverence not only for their work, but also for what they have lived through, the sheer number of years that exist between now and when they first began this. At 25, I cannot imagine standing on a stage and performing from a body of my own work that spans 40 years.

I will leave a detailed consideration of their poetry for another day, once I have bought some of their work and let it spread through my consciousness. What this performance gave me was a single impression: of poignant humour. Like many poets, McGough and Patten inspire laughter, but this is always offset with the necessary poignance of memory.

With their final set complete, the two poets went to leave the stage. Knowing from the scale of the applause that an encore was inevitable, I watched them as they walked. They did not even leave the stage, instead pausing at the edge then turning back to perform a poem by their friend Adrian Henri (whose presence had been felt all evening, in the third chair set out onstage and in the picture projected on the wall behind the performers, portraying the three of them). They again walked away, this time leaving the stage, and I imagined them going to their dressing rooms. Suddenly I realised that I could picture those rooms accurately, for as a teenager I used to perform in this venue with the ensemble I played the tuba with. Whenever we played here or elsewhere, I would sit backstage with my friends, not one of whom I still see.

I walked along the South Bank, then over the bridge to Blackfriars. Whenever I am walking in this area, I am inspired by its man-made beauty; but this process is always self-conscious, as though I must point out to myself that it is beautiful rather than simply enjoying it. Almost every time I have been here, I’ve intended to write something about it, almost composing the words in my head as I walk. Friday was the same – as I experienced all this, my mind was already planning how it would translate that experience into writing. Like my reading, it is as though I can do nothing simply for the pleasure of it: everything must signify, must become meaningful.