‘Met her on a “Save Our NHS” march just before Christmas,’ she continued. ‘She couldn’t make tonight but thinks she might come along next month. I said that’s fine, we can just play it by year. Turn up when you want. No stings attached.’

‘What’s her name?’ Mary asked.

‘She’s called Liz.’

‘Well, let’s just hope that Liz passes mustard,’ said Toby Salt with a smirk.

For one moment, I thought Kaylee was going to thump him. I opened my mouth with the intention of advising her to take him with a grain assault but, thinking better of it, popped another pistachio inside it instead.

Wednesday January 10th

I have decided to fight fire with fire to fight my fear of being fired.

I shall ‘imagineer’ suitably impressive corporate sound bites – or, as I like to think of them, ‘jargon bombs’ – to drop into my report. To prove I can walk the talk, I first need to talk the walk. Just like performing poetry on stage, it is simply a matter of bluff and self-confidence. Seven hours of intensive ‘boiling the ocean’, ‘squeezing the sponge’, and ‘finding ourselves behind the eight ball’ and my report has at last begun to take shape.

All this industry went on amidst a backdrop of angry thoughts about Toby Salt. He has no appreciation of how difficult it is to make poems rhyme. It is far easier to find words that don’t rhyme than ones that do and I have statistics to back me up on that.

Thursday January 11th

Tweets

I think that I shall never meet

A poem lovely as a tweet.

A tweet with words and thoughts compressed

For me to press against my breast.

A tweet that stays with me all day,

Or ’til I put my phone away;

A tweet that I may marvel at,

With a photo of a dancing cat;

Or one that has mistakes within

That I may point out with a grin.

So shove your Larkin and your Keats,

Send to me your blessed tweets!

Before settling down in front of an old episode of Morse, I plucked up the courage to look at my social media accounts. These days, it is not enough for the Modern Poet merely to write poems: audiences must be engaged with and poetic content must be optimised for the purpose of platform and search engine discoverability.

I noted that on Twitter, I have now optimised myself for twenty-three people. Toby Salt has somehow mustered 174 followers. I clearly need to deepen my digital footprint and I have made a vow, with the cat as my witness, to share more of my poems with my foolhardy followers as a next tentative digital baby step.