My beautiful satinwood writing desk has arrived. It has twin blind frieze drawers with almost perfect shut lines, baluster turned and knopped end supports on square-cut and C-scroll trestle bases and leaf-carved scroll feet. Its tooled green-leather writing surface comes in matching shades with gilded tooling and embossing. It was made by nineteenth-century furniture makers Miles and Edwards, whose patrons included several British Ambassadors to Paris and an Empress of Russia.

I practised sitting at it for most of the afternoon, adopting ambassadorial stances, looking up in annoyance at untimely interruptions from my non-existent first secretary and signing fake treaties. It made me want to dip my pen into an inkwell and to write an actual, proper letter, not fire off a quick email or text; to sit there methodically composing each sentence in my head before committing my pen to paper, just as I used to in all those letters to Sophie back in the days when she could still be bothered to read the words I’d write for her.

Tuesday June 5th

Haiku Club

haiku club first rule:

avoid words like antidis-

establishmentar-

It was Japanese Night at Poetry Club. This had been Mary’s suggestion, having admitted last month that she’d been flirting rather heavily with haiku.

It was interesting to see how we’d all managed to instil something of ourselves into the form: Douglas had written a haiku sequence based around the attack on Pearl Harbor; Mary took inspiration from a trip to Tokyo she’d gone on with her first husband (on which it appears she had also flirted rather heavily with her soon-to-be second husband); Chandrima focused on the ephemerality of cherry blossom as a metaphor for the transience of life; Kaylee took up the cause of discrimination against the Ainu people; Liz had me reaching for my pistachios distractedly while she spoke of tantalising kimonos; and I did my usual nonsense. Toby Salt declared the haiku to be too mainstream and chose to present his own poems in the form of the tanka and bussokusekika.

All this short-form stuff meant formal proceedings finished an hour earlier than usual. Discussion moved on to the battlefields trip. Chandrima was in charge of the itinerary and took us through what was planned and when. Douglas expressed disappointment that we were focusing predominantly on the literary aspects of the First World War and less on specific military manoeuvres. I updated everyone on funding, including the good news that we’d successfully been awarded a travel grant for £5,000 from the British Poetry Council; this means we can now afford to employ the services of Dr Dylan Miller, an academic specialising in First World War poetry, as our tour guide, as well as an accompanying actor, who will perform key poems on the battlefields that inspired them.