Harvey: on the occasion of his tenth birthday

Arrrfff! Harvey here. I was ten last Thursday. Any gifts of tennis balls gratefully received. Total destruction guaranteed within twenty minutes.

What with one thing and another, Mrs Boss has had to join the ranks of the 6a.m. dogwalkers, traipsing the darkened streets with a torch. She says she doesn't mind clear mornings when the sky is all black and twinkly, but rain is not so much fun.

Also, while she is not the most social of persons (particularly at 6a.m) she is surprised to find the early morning joggers incapable of as much as a grunt of hello.

So anyway, while she may be too whacked to keep up the blogging right now, she just wants to say that she is still batting about. She was happy to have a poem commended in the Sentinel quarterly poetry competition. It has reminded her that she is supposed to be a writer, and therefore should be writing.

Before that, though, my next walk is due. Oooh look - it's raining!

P is for poem

I hope anyone who knows me in person is sitting down as this may come as a shock. Yes, I know I'm always the one who says "I don't do poetry". It's not that I don't like poetry. I love reading it or hearing it spoken aloud. I just have no concept of how to write it. When an idea comes to me, my first thought is how to make it into a story. Not a poem, song, novel or article, but a story. That feels the most natural form for my writing to take.

In my horsey phase, twenty years ago, I confess I wrote a little ditty for the riding school's magazine. But it's been lost in the mists of a steaming pile of horse manure, and I'm sure Carol Ann Duffy is very relieved about that. Any other attempts to write poems have been brief. Two lines long, on average, before I think "Oh, this is too hard" and give up. Until...

Recently I had a rather horrible day. I went to bed with a single thought going round and round in my head. I remember thinking that if I was someone who wrote poetry, this was exactly the kind of thing I could make into a poem. Through continuing to play with the idea on paper the words somehow arranged themselves into what looked like a verse of four lines. I was quite pleased. But where did I go next?

The following day I received Liane Carter's email containing her guest post (below). Her words about throwing the truth onto the page were what I needed to push me onwards. To make progress with my poem I saw I had to go deeper into the idea and explore the emotion behind it. I kept on adding a couple of lines here and there. By last weekend I'd reached four verses. I felt like I had said what I wanted to say. Gosh. I had written a poem. It was a satisfying feeling, and a bit of a surprise.

Perhaps we all have mental blocks about certain things that we think we cannot do. But sometimes it's good just to try. Just to see.

I enjoyed writing my poem. Maybe I'll write another. You know... in twenty years or so.