Tuesday a work day so up early and on the road. I’m of to Derby to facilitate a training course. On the way I pick up lunch and a couple of Red Bulls. I get to Derby early and get a parking space, which had been my major concern, as parking in Derby is a nightmare. So I am about an hour and a half early and set up the room and the IT and think about the day to come. My colleague rings me to say she has been taken to the wrong place and asks for the address of where I am. As I wait for her to arrive the training attendees start to arrive, I was expecting 20ish and set the room out on that basis. The room begins to fill and then my colleague arrives, still more people arrive. In the end there are 31 people plus myself and colleague squeezed into the room. This was a bit unexpected so my colleague and I conferred and re-planned our approach to the day. I was expecting a tricky day but in fact there was very little active resistance and as the day went on the attendees got more engaged and worked at the tasks that were set. By the end of the day it felt like we had made progress and that some things and some teams had shifted.

I was expecting a slow drive home but actually made good time to the gym where I downed a coffee and waited for my partner. In the gym I clambered aboard my favoured cross trainer and pumped out 767 calories. My step count was well up having been on my feet all day. By the time the gym was done with it was mid evening so it was home to tuna pasta and a little TV. It turns out that my old passport has arrived with the passport office so they can now process my renewal application.

While treading away on the cross trainer I began to get ideas for a poem. It happens sometimes that I get a sense of something growing, forming, which sometimes make it to the page or sometimes withers in the mind. The trick is patience.  When this happens the poem forms itself until there is a moment when I find myself sitting quietly somewhere and it fall out of my pen. They write themselves and I never edit them. Once done they get typed up and filed in a laptop folder, except for those I might write as a letter. I suppose I have poems for me and poems for others, which I do not keep, a kind of gift. I think this current one is of the dark type but much can change between mind and page.