January is a cold, hard place to look into the new decade from. Good luck everybody.

Mexico seems a long time and way away from the depths of the year.

What I’m mulling over here is what kind of new sense of place we are developing in a world of cheap travel, wi-fi and giant-sized carbon footprints.

Where do we belong when we can carry with us the store of photos, documents, music and communications that used to be what we went home for. We can keep a circle of friends around us wherever we are on earth.

It’s the evening of the day between Christmas and Boxing Day and I’m exhausted from delicious food and remarkably nice family times. The remnants of Mexico I brought home to give as presents went down pretty well, as did a video card I made involving Guadalajara Christmas decorations cut with sledging in Birmingham (where we once lived and went to visit best friends there, later walking with our (twentysomething) ‘children’ past the house we once lived in. Revisiting old haunts leads to waves of nostalgia, lots of sighing and very few thoughts of any real substance. Mostly it boils down to ‘how weird we once lived here and now we don’t’.

I’m not long back from a week-long trip to the Guadalajara Bookfair, still feeling jetlagged and gobsmacked by the cold, still aglow with traces of the vivid pinkgreenyellowblues, the tequila and lime and sunshine of Mexico, still drugged by strange time zones so that I suddenly nod off midday, come sharp awake just as my head hits the pillow – in a state of displacement. <:::::::and having written that, went down with a stomach bug…

This poem was created as part of Byron’s My Place or Yours commission and performed at Bristol’s Arnolfini in September. Sorry about the wonky camera-work at the beginning -- it does settle down!

Jay Bernard’s My Place or Yours residency on two allotments -- one in London and one in Oxford -- inspired some wonderful new poems. She performed these for the first time at Apples & Snakes in Soho in June 2009.

This is part one: