It was a great evening, I mean a really great evening. Charlotte Raven and her partner Tom Sheehan opened the doors of their beautiful Kentish Town home for friends, family and fans of The Grass Arena. It was a magnificent gesture of generosity from Charlotte and Tom and everyone who made it appreciated it. The long drawing room made an impressive but intimate venue for John to present his reading. Tom first of all read a piece that John had written some years ago putting The Grass Arena in context for anyone present who might not know its history. That was followed by a brief airing of some archive audio and video footage of John in interview mode. The television interview of John on the Good Morning programme almost 20 years ago was startling. John was sharp, funny and amazingly telegenic. It was the first time I had seen the footage and I was struck by how well he looked and how articulate he was. The drawing room was packed - there were 60 seated and another thirty or so standing. After the footage John, absent from the proceedings thus far, entered the room. The atmosphere was full of anticipation. The audience went very quiet while John took his place – then burst into applause as he prepared himself. “Thank you,” he said and then began. He read about the time he was arrested on suspicion of murder. It is a powerful piece and John performed it with an even,  measured tone. He read on for half an hour and then looked up when he had finished. “Thank you,” he said again and the audience responded with another huge round of applause. Then he took some questions. “What does it mean to you now that your book has been re-published as a modern classic?” I asked first. He replied that he hoped it might pave the way for a new publishing deal for his new work, “Because I haven’t got any more classics under the bed,” he quipped. The Q&As were good natured and lively and the queue for his book signing afterwards was long and patient. Charlotte had spent the previous day cooking vast pots of delicious food that Tom’s mother and father served later on the evening of the event. It was excellent. John is appearing at the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool on Monday October 13th as part of the Bluecoat’s first Chapter and Verse Literary Festival. After his reading he and I will be on stage in conversation. 

 Daniel Day Lewis on The Grass Arena: “The last thing John Healy needs is a tidy snippet of blurb from the likes of me which is a good thing because economy defeats me; I don’t know how to be moderate or concise in praise of his startling autobiography `The Grass Arena’. So economy I’ll leave to him, a master storyteller with an ear, an eye and a voice that should be the envy of many men with weightier reputations. There is no perceptible distance between the words, which seem to have chosen themselves and the experiences from which they blossomed like a garden of wild flowers. Armed to the teeth with his wit and self-knowledge he takes us to that other place, his grass arena, the one which we pass how many times in any given day, averting our eyes? The one into whose violent clutches we might descend more easily than we dare to contemplate. He is our jaunty, gleeful tour guide and messenger from hell. His fellow combatants, exuberant, murderous and sentimental, by turns touchingly loyal, vengeful and treacherous seem to have sprung from the same bloodlines as Falstaff, Pistol, Nell and their fellows. They pitch their tents in the same refuse-filled shadows as their forebears; a confederacy of the dispossessed. Healy’s life, were it not for an astonishing turn of events, seems predestined to be a short one. As in Knut Hamsun’s mighty book `Hunger’, we are utterly compelled both by the power of Healy’s story and his great power in the telling of it, no matter how bleak the outlook, to stay by his side until the last word is writ.”