Stewart Conn, Edinburgh's first makar, talks today at the Mitchell Library (4.30pm) as part of Aye Write!

- Glasgow's Book Festival. Here is a sample from his recently published collection, The Touch of Time: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, £12).

UPHOLSTERY

The sofa in our sitting-room, long the worse

for wear, is newly back from an upholsterer

by royal appointment who announces

that to preserve the cachet of age, "old money"

insists on less padding; whereas rather

than boast a pedigree of bottoms, ours

curves in the centre like dough rising.

A couple of days later we read how

the couch in Freud's consulting room

so sags under the weight of over a century

of recollected terrors, phobias and dreams

as appeal has been launched for its repair:

of greater interest surely, to retain the imprint

of the Wolf Man and those hundreds of others?