Saturday and I surface slowly to find my partner has already risen and had breakfast. She brings me hot water before going off to meet a friend for lunch. I get up and walk down to the chemists to collect my drugs and return to make a late breakfast. The Pope is getting buried on the TV so there is wall to wall coverage that is all red and chanting. Today is poetry stanza day so I select a poem to take with me and run off copies.

429
The end of another tax year, 
pension dependant yet
the revenue man 
continues to badger
me for self-assessments.
Leave me alone,
let me be
in cancerous peace.
All those years of grind
boil down to numbers
in a statement devoid 
of understanding.
But as I flail through 
the mounds of sofa side
papers, a result of 
COVID displacement,
listening to the babble 
of others from my office as was 
I am filed with resentment 
and not a little rage.
Once I knew where all my 
documents lived, organised,
neat and tidy. 
I feel like I live on the street,
my world in a heap
stuffed into plastic bags
and not even colour coded. 
So the radio play
the Mindful Mix and
I write this to calm down. 
I know why the displaced
become terrorists, 
and I have fantasies of 
doing the world a favour
by not missing Trump
by an ears width. 
It seems a more useful thing
than filling in forms.
Woodie had it right,
Some men rob you 
with a gun
others with a fountain pen.
While cancer robs me of my life
HMRC bleeds me dry.
The builders have cried off,
It’s raining,
and I realise just 
how fucking 
irritated I am by it. 
Watch out rowing machine 
here I come,
and to cap it all
it’s in the bloody garage,
in the cold.
I’m on one!

								429 23-01-2025

I drive to the Quaker meeting house where I meet up with nine others of the poetry stanza and spend the next two and a half hours reading, and talking about the groups poetry. It is a good time and full of ideas and images and phrases that are new and evocative. The chair of the group has recently published a poetry pamphlet and so I was able to buy a copy from him before leaving for home.

I drive home with a head full of images and comments and immediately settle on the sofa to watch the English women’s rugby team narrowly beat the French, followed by an FA cup semi final. With a fresh burst of energy I go to the chippy and get tea for my eldest daughter and I before an evening of TV drama until my energy starts to ebb and is time to take my meds and draft the blog. The usual going to bed rituals see me flirting with the midnight.