Thursday June 21st

I need to find something to write about. Anything.

Friday June 22nd

Broken Glass

This glass, which

is broken

Saturday June 23rd

A Glass, Broken

Every day is a shard of glass

Sunday June 24th

The Glass That Shatters

The glass that shatters

Like glass

Monday June 25th

Spent the morning in A&E, having a piece of glass removed from my left foot.

Tuesday June 26th

I am surrounded by £10,000 worth of stupid shed.

Wednesday June 27th

4´35˝

‘How’s the writing going?’ asked Darren, as we sat waiting for the performance to begin.

‘Very well, thanks,’ I lied. ‘Still very much at the ideas stage but that’s actually where a lot of the work gets done.’

‘So what is it you’re writing exactly?’

‘Well, it’s . . . look, there he is!’

My merciful, ministering angel had just appeared on stage. Daniel Blink: erstwhile student of Philip Glass, and one of the world’s leading exponents of minimalism. We stood up to applaud him and then settled ourselves in for the performance.

It was while he was playing a cover version of John Cage’s composition 4´33˝ that I felt my literary constipation unblocking itself. I had the sudden inspiration to translate that piece into poetic form. I’d written a similar piece a while back but had never been entirely happy with it.

I shifted in my seat as 27th Club’s lyrical laxative kicked in. Darren had to persuade me from leaving early so eager was I to get back home. After Blink had taken his bows, Darren confessed that he felt rather circumspect about minimalism.

‘It left me wanting a little more,’ he said. I agreed with him, more or less.

I hurried home to write my poem, keeping well away from the shed. It ended up being slightly longer than Cage’s piece as I didn’t want to stop when in full flow. I may revisit it and edit it down one day. I wrote it on the sofa, beneath a cat, wallowing in front of Wallander and the sound of two weeks of ignored messages and notifications pinging into my phone.

Thursday June 28th

This is the Title of this Poem

and this its first line

and while this poem is perhaps

not one of my best,

it still has its moments,

such as the surprise appearance in line six

of a capybara, snuffling in long grass,

and a beautiful descrption

of the dance of light upon sun-dappled Umbrian stone

in line eight.

It also contains, in this very sentence,

the striking incongruity of Charlemagne,

kneeling solemnly at the altar

in Saint Peter’s Basilica, juxtaposed

with a muddy puddle, in which lies

one of Jeremy Clarkson’s driving gloves.

In spite of all this delicate brushwork,

this poem has generally been poorly received,

described by the Sunday Times

as ‘irritatingly self-referential’

and the Guardian as ‘promising much

but delivering little’.

Considerable schadenfreude

has been experienced on Twitter