I checked in to Twitter for the first time in several centuries. In my absence, my following has blossomed. There are now forty-three people hanging on my every tweet. Toby Salt has nearly five thousand followers. His page is a relentless mudflow of self-promotion: his latest competition success; upcoming book signings for This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave; another piece in the Guardian.

I returned to my funeral poem but progress continued to be slow. At some stage I must have drifted off to sleep on the sofa because I fell into a dream. I was a police inspector called in to investigate the death of a poet, who’d been found in suspicious circumstances. He was lying on the floor in the hallway of his apartment, with the pages from his latest book stuffed into his mouth. At the post-mortem, his body was found to contain traces of many harmful toxins, a lethal cocktail of dactyls and spondees and several lines of iambic pentameter.

I think all these deliberations on death are beginning to have a deleterious effect on me.

Friday August 10th

I read ‘Now I Am Dead’ again:

Now I am dead,

please do not weep for me.

Your tears won’t bring me back,

now I am dead.

Now I am dead,

you can clear out all my shoes.

I’ll not need them where I am going,

now I am dead.

Now I am dead,

don’t forget to do the bins on Friday

(this week is general landfill),

now I am dead.

Now I am dead,

you can crack on with that loft extension

I’d never much cared for,

now I am dead.

I seem to have fallen into the trap again of making it too personal, although there may be themes within it that resonate universally (death, the bins, etc.). At least, there’s a decent balance of poignancy (‘your tears won’t bring me back’) and practicality (‘you can clear out all my shoes’ etc).

All the same, I don’t feel very confident that I’ve cracked it. Regardless, I’ve sent all three poems off to a few local funeral parlours to see if they might be interested in including them in any information packs they may hand out to grieving customers.

Saturday August 11th

Catastrophe

don’t know

what drives me crazier,

your amnesia

or pyromania

even now

I still think about

the time you forgot

to put the cat out

Dylan told me that Stuart hired a Maserati in Marbella so they might better experience the ‘majesty of the Sierra Blanca foothills’. He said this somewhat pointedly, as we boarded our third train of the day. In total, it took four trains, two buses and one three-mile walk to make it to our North Yorkshire idyll, a mere fourteen hours after setting off.