None of this should detract from how frequently very funny Toy Fights is. The book is beautifully crafted. To say it has a poet’s touch suggests a style that is lyrical or even glutinous, but really the language is precise, balanced and every other sentence has me wondering “How did he do that?” It’s full of set pieces, like Paterson’s description of sleeping in nylon pyjamas between nylon sheets, where “if I turned over suddenly in the night I got tased,” and “in the morning my hair was like Eraserhead, and I had learned to automatically put a foot on the floor to earth myself before I turned the lamp on”. The book itself is beautifully written and enjoyable. It does talk about poverty and music, there were also some funny moments in between to lighten up the mood. I wasn’t too familiar with Don Paterson beforehand, but I’m so glad I ended up requesting this on NetGalley. Robert De Niro loses his cool in court after being asked if he urinated while on the phone to his ex-assistant and called her a bi**h

Don Paterson: ‘Poetry often involves obsessive personalities’

The strength of this memoir lies in Paterson’s range of verbal pyrotechnics allowing him to light upon serious themes with devastating accuracy. He rightly skewers the “staggering indifference of both right and left elites towards the poor I grew up among”, and his account of the “circling, self-feeding fear” that preceded his youthful breakdown is as clear-eyed as it is moving. Combative yet compassionate, entertaining yet undeceived, Toy Fights recognises the importance of not being too earnest, and is wholly authentic for it. You live in Kirriemuir, Angus, with your partner, and have twin sons from a previous relationship. Why does being Scottish matter so much to you? At the end, after a trawl through the Dundee club scene and its spectacular sexual shenanigans, he boards a train and sets off for London, guitar in hand. I just hope he is working on his second volume of memoirs.

The idea first came, he says, as a book about his life as a working musician, “daft life-on-the-road stuff. I thought it would be nice to collect all the anecdotes. And that was met with some enthusiasm by my publisher, because it wasn’t poetry! And then I just couldn’t face it. Because when I started to remember, it was, oh God, this isn’t the book that was commissioned at all.” In the end Paterson felt he couldn’t write it before certain things in his life happened, “principally my father dying”. I’m just writing this up because I found it interesting. I don’t really know what to rate this book. Maybe 5 stars! It is an intensely moving book. I hope there’s a second volume which, now (as in, then) he’s in London, may explain why he comes off as mildly preoccupied with a certain ‘type’ that generally do not feature in the book but presumably loom(ed) large in future.

Toy Fights by Don Paterson review: ditching God for music in Toy Fights by Don Paterson review: ditching God for music in

An acupuncturist once told me I was addicted to the feeling of being dehydrated. I don’t know! It’s weird, but thanks for reminding me to take a swig. Sugar is a working-class analgesic and what I was raised on You got involved in Pentecostal Christianity as a teenager. Have you left religion behind for ever? Great British Bake Off 2023: Sixth contestant to leave is announced after screwing up Technical challenge Kelly Ripa is pretty in pink as Barbie and her husband Mark Consuelos dons stripes as Ken for their Halloween special on Live With Kelly & MarkYou might emerge from Baldragon with a heroin habit, tears tattooed on your face, pregnant, dead or all of the above, but you might have added to that a Higher Latin, an opinion on the South Sea Bubble and some basic facility on the clarinet.’