Well friends, I cannot lie. It’s been a hell of a weekend - partner off on a jaunt to foreign parts and your truly abandoned here in London with 3 kids, one nearly-adult and a dog. Some of the week was devoted to reading the submissions for Magma 42, a magazine I’m assistant editing. Big responsibility to read things properly - who knows what you might miss? And I’m a poet. I know what it’s like to be rejected. Now I’m on the other end of the process and really want to be respectful.

 

And of course weekend has been almost unmanageable.

 

I spent all of Saturday at Community Building Day in Forest Gate (no idea where that is, just went where the satellite navigator took me). This was for the teen poetry slam I’m helping with. About a hundred 14 year olds all gathered together with a bunch of performance poets to write a perform poetry. Incredible day where I spent most of the time ‘floating’, as Jacob Sam La Rose the artistic director put it, following him around as he organised and organised and organised. There was a lot of organising going on behind the creative endeavours. Absolutely bloody knackering. Organising is not my strong point, although I enjoyed following around someone who has a talent for it. From there I moved straight on to host The Shuffle at the Poetry Cafe where we had a great turn-out and seven universally excellent readers. I dredged up the last bits of energy I had left and pumped them right in. By the time I got home I felt as if I’d been run over by something very big and heavy, but I was high on poetry all the same. My older kids had been babysitting and the younger ones were still awake at about 11pm. My daughter (7) flung herself into my arms with such force that I was knocked backwards and trod hard on the dog’s paw. She was limping last night but she seems fine now.

 

Today I did dog walking, grocery shopping and watched the ballet show my daughter was involved in. Chaos. Hundreds of kids and parents everywhere all jostling to get in and out as soon as possible.

 

Now I’m home and all I want to do is curl up in front of the telly but there’s dog to stroke, kids to feed and TLC to dispense. My father said to me ‘Nobody told you to have four children’. Well true. But nobody said how lovely they’d be either.

 

Next week looks pretty busy too. I’m so glad I’m not a one-parent family.