... so my mother-in-law turned eighty on Monday and we had a party for her which I catered. You know it went really well, but happened to coincide with a major editing job, and the near completion of the cover for my pamphlet.

 

My friend Bridget - artist and writer - has been working on the cover and having a lot of fun with ideas. Halfway through my mother-in-law’s party she called me and said ‘I need to run a couple of ideas past you, can you meet me in five minutes at the end of the road?’. Bridget and I live close to each other, which is lucky considering all the to-ing and fro-ing we’ve been doing. Anyway, I excused myself and off I trotted down the road to meet Bridget,who was clutching her sketchbook and looking very artistic. We met beside this incredibly large tree that almost blocks the pavement and is pulling up the tarmac around it. I’ve often tried to write about that tree, and failed.

 

Bridget and I had a ten minute summit and went our separate ways, but it made me think a lot about the nature of the life of an artist of any sort. You never have time off. Apart from the practical considerations (how and where to get published, looking at a pamphlet cover) there is the fact that your antennae are always pointed somewhere. You can never switch off. It’s like reading. I often think it’s a kind of blissful state of innocence, the time before you learn to read, where you’re not constantly assailed by the printed word and of course so much of it is not worth reading and is just a kind of mind pollutant.

 

Not that poetry is a mind-pollutant of course. But it does start to invade everything, because your life is your material. Even when I’m not aware of it, there’s poetry, doing its stuff. Perpetuating itself.

 

Talking of which, school holidays end in the middle of next week. I will have to get my sorry arse back to the gym regularly (instead of irregularly) but happily, there will be time for Me Me Me.