I had planned to write a poem this evening but ran out of time, having spent it rearranging my bookshelves to accommodate the new arrivals – without much success, it must be said. There are now books resting on top of other books and piles are forming on the floor.

Friday April 6th

At 11.30, I posted up another poem on Twitter:

On tentaclehooks I wait,

in the deep ocean dark,

for the right cephalopod

to steal my three hearts.

I’d called it ‘Squid Goals’. I hoped it might be World Cephalopod Day. It wasn’t.

A few minutes later, Liz retweeted it. And then, a reply! ‘Thanks,’ it read. ‘I needed some nonsense today.’

I worked on my response to her until lunchtime. I was aiming for something that was simultaneously witty and matter-of-fact, as well as sophisticated and approachable. After an hour of deliberation, I settled on the rather more prosaic and insouciant, ‘no probs’. That appeared to draw a line under the whole matter – although not for the RSPCA, who tweeted me to ask for a photograph of ‘these so-called tentaclehooks’, as they sounded potentially harmful to squidlife.

Saturday April 7th

There was another resounding victory for Dylan’s football team today. In his pre-match team-talk, I heard him tell his teammates that they needed to express themselves more because ‘nothing is art if it does not come from nature’.

On the long walk home, I asked him whether he’d come up with that himself or if it was another one of Stuart’s. He looked at me disappointedly. ‘I came across it in Barcelona,’ he said. ‘It’s Gaudí.’ I nodded sagely. He was manager between Rijkaard and Guardiola, I think.

When we got back, Dylan declared it was time for Geography revision. I volunteered my services. While he was getting his nose into textbooks full of glaciers, oxbow lakes, cumulonimbi, drumlins, and scree, I tried to help out by recreating the Burgess and Hoyt model of urban land use through the medium of Lego: with limited success, it must be said.

Sunday April 8th

Brazenly, I messaged Liz on Twitter to invite her on the Poets on the Western Front trip. To my delight, she responded almost instantly, saying that she’d love to come.

It feels like I’ve crossed a line, jumped over the barbed wire and exposed myself in No Man’s Land, and now there are only two courses of action open to me: stand here and wait for annihilation, or plough on and hope to storm her trenches.

Monday April 9th

Cell

There was a time when I was an office somebody; if not one of the big enchiladas, then at least a small- to medium-sized quesadilla. My officle was envied by others for its desirable fenestered location. I had the run of the second-floor, east-side colour printer. It was widely rumoured that I had the ear of Janice.