Aujourd’hui j’ai révisé le français avec Dylan. Nous avons travaillé très dur. C’était bien ennuyant. Le chat dormait. Dave, Martin et Marvin ont mis leur musique très forte pendant tout l’après-midi et Mme McNulty a scié. Nous avons mangé tous les custard creams.

After I’d returned from chez Dylan, I noticed that he’d left his French Grammar and Practice book lying on the table. For reasons which remain unclear to me, I spent the evening leafing through its pages to find some of my favourite sentences and create a ‘found poem’ of sorts. I have called it ‘In Winter They Adjust the Thermostat’. À ces égards, nous passer le temps.

She’s leaving on the seventh of May.

‘Which dress do you like the best?’

She won’t answer me.

There are a few potatoes left.

She’s staying at home today.

The birds wake up early in summer.

She doesn’t want to see anybody.

Nothing’s changed.

The train arrives at two o’clock.

I don’t think about it any more.

She stops in front of a shop window.

There’s not a lot to see.

We don’t have enough time

To be born. To die. To come. To go.

In winter, they adjust the thermostat.

It’s raining. She can’t swim.

Sunday May 20th

Man of Action

I am writing to report my dissatisfaction.

How dare you say I am not a man of action.

You say I like:

to sleep, to loaf, to lie around,

to drift, to dawdle, to loll and lounge.

All verbs, I note.

Have you not heard

that verbs are known

as doing words?

There are times in life when you just have to seize the day. The ancient Romans used to have a phrase for this, so impatient were they to get on with things – tempus fugit – which literally means ‘to fight time’. For, they believed, in order for the day to be seized, time needs to be battled – and that’s exactly what I did today.

I had been giving some more thought to the business of how I might make some inroads into the whole Liz thing when my phone buzzed. There, among my Twitter notifications, was a message from Liz:

Fancy meeting up next Friday?

This was the opportunity I’d been seeking and I was determined to grab it with both of my grubby day-seizing hands. Not one to dither, after just forty-five minutes I had managed to fashion a reply that I thought struck exactly the right tone of acceptance and forthrightness:

Yes.

This was all very well but as any day-seizer worth the name knows, the devil is in the detail: we needed a where and a when. I waited for Liz to tell me. Five minutes later:

How about the Tate Modern?

12 o’clock?