The locally-based poet took the room on a journey of emotions as he presented verses from his diverse catalogue.

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In one instance, he told of a cyclist pedalling a new bike up the Singing Bridge in an earnest Christmas attempt to better themselves.

Struggling with the journey, insult was added to injury when a pelican upon the light-post decided to unleash his digestive system upon the poor cyclist.

Next, Bob recounted in rhyme an attempt to take up golf, noting that he knew what he was doing because “the Australian male is uniquely qualified to give advice to professional sportsmen and referees”.

The exacting standards of golf club selection, the minutiae of sports in general, and the struggle to understand why sand traps exist, turned his simple round into a quest for some kind of redemption, traversing evil sand-traps the size of the Sahara, diving deep into the dark heart of a lake, and being surrounded by living trees that scoop the ball from the fairway.

By the time he had reached the first hole, with 73 shots already accrued, the room was laughing out loud.

A sombre turn was taken with a poem about a banged-up bugle going for a pittance at an auction, before a veteran quietly offered to make it play again.

In a salute to the ANZACs, the room could clearly hear the Last Post playing as Bob described the scene.

Hilarity ensued again as the next poem followed the ill-advised attempts to tangle with an ‘idiot-proof’ washing machine, which soon transformed into a leviathan that invaded the household with sudsy laundry and would not answer to any tools from Bob’s extensive box.

A lament for the way things used to be was followed by a recount of a camping trip with his wife in the great outdoors, where her reluctance to leave her favoured modcons was only compounded by the Bureau of Meteorology’s inability to give an accurate forecast.

The bright, sunny day in the desert gave way to rain and sinking quagmires, in what came across as yet another oddly relatable story, perhaps in spite of, or because of, the dramatic turns.

Bob ended his readings with a mercifully abridged version of ‘Man from Snowy River’, and the whole room enjoyed a dose of belly laughs, and appreciated proof of the power of poetry, all of which came from Bob’s fifth book ‘Facts, Fibs and Fables’ – “some of them are true, some might be true”, but he would not say which were which.

At the meeting, another batch of six were added to the local Probus Club’s steadily growing list of 160-plus members.

By Thomas O’KEEFE