Cover

Brian Bilston

Diary of a Somebody

January

Monday January 1st

My Resolution Will Not Be Televised

You will not be able to discover it from your sofa, brother.

You will not be able to sit there under the cat, sister,

remote control in one hand, phone in the other,

and put the kettle on during the ad breaks,

because my resolution will not be televised.

My resolution will not be tweeted.

My resolution will not be announced on Twitter.com

in 280 characters of self-promoting concision

to be retweeted by Ricky Gervais in between posts

deploring acts of animal cruelty and the release date of his latest film.

My resolution will not be tweeted.

My resolution will not be televised.

My resolution will not be Facebooked.

My resolution will not feature next to an inspirational quote

set against the backdrop of a soaring mountain or a looking-glass lake.

My resolution will not be posted beside a shining infographic

illustrating how many kilos I have lost, how many pennies

I have saved, how many drinks I have not drunk.

My resolution will not be Facebooked.

My resolution will not be tweeted.

My resolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures on Instagram

of kale soup and black bean–quinoa salad.

There will be no pictures on Instagram

of NutriBullet breakfast smoothies.

My resolution will not be vlogged.

My progress will not be revealed to you in a twenty-minute daily video diary.

My resolution will not be right back after a message

about my new range of eyebrow pencils.

My resolution will not be vlogged.

There will be no pictures on Instagram.

My resolution will not be Facebooked.

My resolution will not be tweeted.

My resolution will not be televised.

My resolution will not survive more than two days.

My resolution will not be televised.

My resolution will be diarised. I shall write a poem a day. It will be a daily testament to the power of poetry and how it can help us make sense of the world. A kind of inky monument to Truth and Beauty.

I shall set my poems down here: in this surprisingly affordable medium-ruled notebook with acid-free pages, rounded corners and expandable inner pocket, with its cover illustration of an anthropomorphised white Japanese bobtail cat sporting a red bow.

I do not underestimate the task ahead. Writing a poem every day will not be easy. It will require discipline. Mental resilience. Self-sacrifice. Vast reservoirs of imagination. And a ready supply of custard creams.

Tuesday January 2nd

I lay in bed until mid-day, bathing in the cotton sea of tranquillity that is my duvet. Inspired by my surroundings, I attempted a poem. I got as far as:

Duvet,

you are so groovet,

I’d like to stay under you

all of Tuesdet.

I didn’t care for it much. The rhymes seemed a little forced. I worked on it for a while longer but produced nothing more of note, except for a doodle of a cat on a skateboard. I was quite pleased with that. The cat was wearing headphones and I’d drawn a speech bubble coming out of its mouth with the words “I AM A CAT ON A SKATEBOARD!” written inside it.

I am forty-five years old.

I wondered whether it was my working conditions that were the problem. It is unnaturally quiet. This is partially explained by the temporary absence of students next door, whose general rowdiness frequently serves to keep me awake most of the night and disturb me for much of the day. By contrast, Mrs McNulty, on the other side, is typically as quiet as a pea, except for the occasional sounds of sawing and her Wednesday night séances.

In the hope that a change of scenery might help, I got up to press on with the rearrangement of my bookshelves. This year, I’ve decided to re-order by International Standard Book Number. I went at it tenaciously and must have lost track of the hours. It was time for bed and I’d still only got as far as Little Dorrit (or 0192545124 as I have now come to think of it).

It was only then that I remembered my New Year’s resolution. I took another look at my duvet poem. Would that do? Probably not, I decided. My cat doodle also seemed less impressive now. It looked more like a dog. A dog on a trolley.

Two days! That’s all it has taken for my resolution to be smashed on the craggy, unforgiving rocks of my literary negligence. All in all, this constitutes one of my better efforts of recent years.

Wednesday January 3rd

I would like to apologise for the delay

I would like to apologise for the delay

in coming to work today.

This is due to a signalling failure

between my primary motor cortex and pyramidal motor pathway.

I shall remain here instead,

sidelined in this bed,

until further notice.

I would like to apologise for the delay

in going for a run today.

This is due to leaves on the tracksuit

I wore last week,

during my unsuccessful attempt to bury myself

in a coppiced wood.

I would be there still, if I could.

I would like to apologise for the delay

in joining your skiing holiday.

This is due to the wrong kind of snow,

which, as far as I’m concerned, is any kind of snow

that enables people

to hurtle down slopes, at speed,

on skis.

I would like to apologise for the delay

in taking part in life today.

This is due to delays.

I would like to apologise for the delay in getting to work today. This is due to writing a poem. Thankfully, Janice is not back until next week so she wasn’t there to see me slip into my officle ninety minutes late.

Even at the best of times, my officle presents a distressingly joyless sight; not quite office, not quite cubicle, it exists in a permanent state of beige and bewildered irresolution. But there are few sights as depressing as my officle on the first day back after the Christmas break: tinsel droops around my PC monitor; an uninspired Secret Santa gift (yet another pine-scented candle!) sits on top of my in-tray, jilted at the altar of my ingratitude; abandoned corporate Christmas cards silently reproach me from the flimsy wall panels.

With the aid of a mid-morning Twix, I attempted to coax my brain into thinking about the report I’m supposed to be putting together for Janice. It has the working title of “Re-solutioning the Brand: from Customer Dissension to Retention”. I have yet to start it, mainly for the reason that I don’t really know what it means. Staring out through my officle window into the midwinter bleakness, I pictured Janice skiing down the slopes at Kitzbühel, the snow gleaming like powdered champagne.

Thursday January 4th

I wasn’t in the mood for poetry today. I think it’s all this work business. Larkin may have had his library stamp and Bukowski his mailbags but it strikes me that proper work is unconducive to the creation of poetry. It’s not easy to elevate yourself to a higher plane when your mind is being laid siege to by flipcharts and pivot tables.

The cat doesn’t help either. She is my furry straitjacket. Every time I sit down with the intention of writing, she sees this as her cue to lie on top of me and pin my arms down. My writing speed reduces to five words per minute; by the time I’ve physically managed to write a line, all previously imagined words and ideas have oozed from my brain like custard through a cattle-grid.

I cracked on with some more ISBNs instead. The project was proceeding apace and my bookshelves were beginning to look pleasingly resystematised.

Until, that is, I came to 1903436419.

I had all but forgotten it. Tentatively, I peeked inside. And, yes, there was the familiar spidery scrawl of Sophie’s writing, in the margins, next to my own. The love-notes we passed to each other in the back of a lecture hall, lifetimes ago, years before it all went wrong.

Friday January 5th

Everyday is like bin day

Everyday recycled and grey

It’s the first bin day of the new year: general landfill. I made sure my lilac sacks were securely tied and primed the night before and my alarm clock set so I might rise in good time to minimise potential mishap. The Man at Number 29 had clearly taken no such precautions given his frantic bag-handed dash down the street in futile pursuit of the lorry.

Trudging slowly through the wet streets

back to the house where your bins weren’t emptied.

And all the bags you found

that you forgot to put out, Armageddon,

come Armageddon, come Armageddon, come.

Any feelings of residential primacy were short-lived. Dave, Martin and Marvin were unloading items for the new term from their VW Beetle when I returned from work. These included a seven-piece drum-kit (Dave is an acoustic engineering student), a Moog modular synthesizer (Martin is a music technology student) and a life-size anatomical skeleton (Marvin is a sociology student but one with a rather peculiar fetish for medical supplies and equipment). They high-fived me as they headed in next door.

I went into my own house, which was still in something of a state from last night. There were books all over the sitting-room floor and my Morrissey singles lay scattered as if someone had summoned a nuclear bomb.

Saturday January 6th

Anthem for Doomed Christmas Trees

What passing bells for trees who lie in gutters?

Only the monstrous rumble of the vans

will drown out their silent cries. No muttered

prayers, no roadside eulogies or thanks.

Doorstep-dumped, no longer spruce,

who now will pine for you and cry?

Unbaubled, untinseled, stripped of use,

off to the Great Wood Chipper in the Sky;

How long has it been – two or three weeks? –

since we laid out our gifts at your feet?

How quickly the present becomes the past

and time sweeps all needles from its path.

I dumped my tree on the pile at the edge of the park and returned to find Sophie waiting outside my house with Dylan. She rarely says a word directly to me these days, preferring instead to communicate through a combination of hand gestures and glowers. She handed him over to me with a look that clearly meant: return him to me in one piece or you’ll be the next to have your baubles removed.

We headed off to football, where important father–son bonding takes place over unfailingly inclement weather, volleys of verbal abuse from opposition parents, and humiliating, life-scarring defeats. Today’s trouncing is a respectable 0–8. Dylan, isolated on the wing, just stood on the touchline for most of the game, shivering. Rob Trafford, the Under 16s’ beleaguered and chronically inept manager, declared it to be ‘a season-defining performance’. It was hard to disagree with him.

We arrived back home to the ominous signs of party preparations being made next door.

Sunday January 7th

I Did Not Tell Death Where I Lived

I did not tell Death where I lived,

But he has found me all the same.

I hear him knocking on my door

And calling out my name.

My Snapchat settings kept Him out.

On Twitter I did block Him.

His Facebook friend requests were spurned.

Yet still he keeps on knocking.

Court injunctions were sought and filed

But still I sit in fear.

Oh, my mistake. It is not Death.

I think my pizza’s here.

I drew back my bedroom curtains to find Death staring back at me. He was wearing a fixed and maniacal grin of sickly menace. His ghastly eye sockets bore into mine. Fingers, bony and extended, clawed at the glass.

Staggering back, I gathered the courage to look again; it was Marvin’s skeleton. Whether it had been placed there by design to terrify me or whether it had simply been launched up into the air and failed to come back down, I don’t know. I marched next door and pressed the buzzer continuously until I saw a shuffling hooded figure emerge. For the second time in the space of a few minutes, I found myself in the presence of a gruesome Death-like creature. This one was wearing a dark blue towelling dressing gown. I began to harangue it but gave up when it was clear that it was impervious to my ranting, or indeed any aspect of the world of which it was supposedly a part.

Monday January 8th

The Tyrolean air must contain magical, soothing properties. Janice, in an uncustomary gesture of benevolence, has granted me a week’s extension on my report. This is all very well but I am still no nearer understanding what it is that I’m expected to write about; the problem of working in a business that sells ‘solutions’ is that none of us really know what that means and there exists a kind of collective corporate complicity that makes us all too scared to ask.

Tuesday January 9th

Poetry Club

The first rule of Poetry Club

is that we meet each month in the pub.

The second rule of Poetry Club

is that not all poems have to rhyme.

Contrary to popular stereotype, poets are hardy creatures; neither Arctic blizzards nor desert sandstorms, mighty earthquakes nor rampaging tornados are likely to get much in the way of a poet with the opportunity to read their work to an audience with no obvious means of escape. Consequently, there was full attendance at Poetry Club in spite of the evening’s bitter cold.

Mary got proceedings off to a poignant start with a requiem to her husband, Leonard, who tragically died in the Falklands. This was not during hostilities, as it turns out, but falling off a cliff while attempting to photograph a colony of rockhopper penguins. Leonard, as we’ve learnt over the years, was her third husband of six. The sequence runs as follows: Divorced, Bewildered, Died, Divorced, Befuddled, Surprised.

Next, it was the turn of Douglas, who launched into a ballad concerning rival sea captains at the Battle of Lepanto of 1571. This he attempted to bring to life with a sequence of nautical actions and sound effects. Twenty minutes in, and with no end in sight, we were able to coax him to sit down with a double rum and Coke, during a particularly heavy spell of cannonade.

Chandrima captivated us with a poem about a doomed love affair between a wealthy Delhi merchant prince and a serving-girl, followed by a brief meditation on the movements of the moon. And then, in a sudden change of pace and tone, Kaylee treated us to a very impassioned spoken-word piece about urban decay, rape and abortion, which made us all rather quiet and reflective for a while.

I did my best to lighten the mood with a few poems about Piers Morgan, bus journeys and the seasonal migration of ice-cream vans. As ever, I could sense Toby Salt sneering at me from his seat in the corner and trying to distract the others in the middle of my usual hesitant, stumbling performance.

Toby Salt is very dismissive of my work. He claims it lacks gravitas and soul.

‘As Carl Sandberg once said,’ he declared pompously at our last meeting, ‘“poetry should be an echo, asking a shadow to dance”.’ Three years of studying Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and he thinks he knows it all.

Toby Salt is particularly dismissive of my rhyming schemes and poorly constructed metre. His modus operandi is free verse. However, I like to think that I treat ALL poets with equal respect, whatever their literary shortcomings, and so I sat quietly through all four of his frankly impenetrable poems, flicking empty pistachio shells into a pot.

After we’d all sat down, Mary took the opportunity to remind us about our commitment to finding new members for the year ahead. There used to be ten of us but numbers have dwindled in recent times. Not even poetry is immune from the age of austerity.

‘So then, how’s the recruitment drive coming on?’ she asked. ‘Any leads, anyone?’

I stared intently at my pint glass. I could sense others doing the same. Toby Salt broke the silence.

‘Believe me, I really wish I could help. It’s not as if I don’t know a lot of poets.’

The eyes of my fellow club members began to roll.

‘Actually, I know someone who may be interested so how about you stop doing us down for a change and casting all these nasturtiums,’ said Kaylee, glaring at Toby Salt.

Good old Kaylee! You could always tell when she was worked up about something as the contents of her lexical filing cabinet would become all muddled up.

‘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.

Meanwhile on Facebook, Sophie has updated her status to ‘In a Relationship’. This news is accompanied by a smiley-faced emoji. She has also been tagged in a photograph with somebody calling himself ‘Stuart Mould’. In the picture, they appear to be undertaking some kind of candlelit dinner together. Sophie looks very happy about something; I can only assume it’s the gammon.

Friday January 12th

The Man at Number 29 has put his general landfill out on the day for recycling: it’s a basic bin-day error. Even Dave, Martin and Marvin seem to be able to get that right.

He’s not my only neighbour with troubles: Mrs McNulty came around in a state of agitation, prattling on about a rather spurious incident involving her dog in the night-time. She claims that her golden Labrador, Aleister, has spontaneously combusted. She pointed at a pile of ashes in her back garden which was where she said she’d last seen him, sitting there quietly and gazing sadly up at the moon.

I have my doubts: partly because it looked more like cigarette ash to me (Mrs McNulty is a committed smoker of Gauloises); and partly because she claimed the same thing had happened to Mr McNulty following his disappearance, although it’s common knowledge he lives three streets away in a pebble-dashed fifties semi with a woman named Sandra, whom he met at sales conference in Derby. Also, Mrs McNulty has never owned a dog.

Saturday January 13th

4-4-2

Trudging back from football (0–11), I found myself man-marked by Dylan, who regaled me with tales of his mother’s new boyfriend – or ‘Stuart’, as he seems so desperate to be called:

‘Mum says she’s not used to having a proper man around. He’s put those shelves up in the sitting room – the ones you were always promising to do – and last Sunday he cooked us all a roast. He even drives me to football practice.’

And then, going in with his studs showing:

‘Why did you never learn to drive, Dad? Do poets drive – or are they always passengers?’

I told Dylan that perhaps it would be for the best if he could stop talking in order to conserve his energy for the final three miles’ walk home.

Sunday January 14th

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