‘Whenever I come to Oxford/I’m guaranteed a warm reception/ For I always bring a brand new poem/And this year is no exception.” Short, sweet, and with tongue planted firmly in cheek, Roger McGough’s poetry reading started in typical fashion, effortlessly wooing his eager-to-be-pleased audience in their ever-so-comfy seats at the Oxford Playhouse. Little did we know, however, that his poetic blandishments were by no means reserved for us alone; for ‘Oxford’ substitute ‘Hay’, ‘Edinburgh’, ‘Cheltenham’ – you get the picture. But isn’t this cheeky playfulness precisely the essence of McGough, that naughtiest and most linguistically incorrigible of everymen?

With his much-anticipated new poetry collection That Awkward Age published just a few months ago, the reading saw McGough’s classic repertoire interspersed with many new and quirky glimpses into the poet’s world. Concerns of age and ageing naturally featured prominently, with a particularly magical seam of poems about childhood, focusing on that nightly rite of passage, the bedtime story. Classic tales were reimagined in McGough’s “ill-fitting glass slippers” and “transvestite wolves”, and his account of learning to read as a child during the war, “by the light of a burning Messerschmitt” saw him in his wittiest and most irreverent poetic mode.

Among the lighter works it was McGough’s poems in response to Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife that stole the show. Counterbalancing her Mrs Midas and Mrs Aesop were his Mr Nightingale, Mr Blyton and Mr of Arc, all of which delighted in their delicately anarchic overturning of expectation.

There was, however, a second, more unexpectedly contemplative vein to proceedings – poems in which McGough confronted his fears of old age and particularly of dementia. A Fine Romance, written over the course of several years, explored the experience of mental debilitation, and its impact on our closest relationships. Painfully elegiac, with its series of surrealist images flickering between confusion and absolute visual clarity, it was a rare glimpse into the poetic guts that lie beneath McGough’s seductively glib linguistic facility.

As charming a raconteur as a poet, he stitched the evening’s poems together with a self-deprecating flow of comment and anecdote that highlighted McGough’s greatest skill – that of intimacy. The sense of chatting to an old friend always evoked by his books or episodes of Poetry Please is even further heightened in person.

Life may be short and death will inevitably come, but after an hour with Roger McGough it’s a fate we’ll all be facing with a grin and a spring in our Zimmer frame-assisted step.