At this stage, I’d love to share an early draft of a new Canterbury tale with innovative use of setting; be as brave as Jay Bernard sharing a raw longhand manuscript embroidered with colourful notes and corrections. But I’m still at the thinking stage and still plucking up the courage to share a first draft with the world when it eventually arrives. So here’s one I prepared earlier, The Wife of Bafa.

The poem was a long time coming. It was conceived in an A’level classroom in Colwyn Bay 28 years ago. I lived five minutes from the sea and firmly believe that winter walks along the prom, with waves crashing on the sea road, helped channel my teenage angst into gritty poetry. (I regularly brainstorm in the shower – water clearly inspires me). I first encountered Chaucer’s General Prologue and fell for his irony and the flamboyant, three-dimensional Wife of Bath. My English teacher set us homework to write a character sketch in the style of Chaucer. I got my only ‘A’ and subsequently wrote a General Prologue to the Colwyn Bay Tales. It’s a sequence of portraits of mods, rockers, New Romantics and scooter boys. So here’s one I prepared even earlier:

The Prologue whetted my appetite. I vowed that one day I’d do justice to the Wife of Bath’s character. I finally wrote the piece ten years ago, my first attempt at a dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue is first-person poem that reveals the character’s own psychology and the dramatic situation. Once I decided to make her Nigerian, I let her character take over and paid little attention to the dramatic situation. I never set out to make her sell something to her audience. Yet there she was, stepping out of the page trying to sell cloth by line 6! It’s later been suggested I was inspired by the end of The Pardoner’s Tale when he tries to sell fake pardons to his fellow pilgrims. As this was another A’level text it must have influenced me subliminally. I’ve written an analysis of The Wife Of Bafa, but at the end of the day, readers and listeners will always find more meanings than I ever imagined…

I’m Canterbury Laureate till the end of this year and have just received Arts Council funding to rework Chaucer’s Tales (working title Roving Mic). The original text uses setting on several levels. First you have the gathering of pilgrims at the Tabard Inn on Southwark High Street. They’re setting off for Canterbury on horseback – the word ‘canter’ is short for Canterbury trot, the supposed pace at which pilgrims rode to Canterbury. Each pilgrim must tell two tales on the way there and two on the way back; and whoever tells the best tale will get a free meal paid for by all the other pilgrims. It’s the first UK poetry slam. The dramatic tension is strong and between tales we get a clear sense of time and place e.g.

Sey forth they tale, and tarie nat the tyme;
Lo Depeford! And it is half-wey pryme.
Lo Grenewych, ther many a shrewe is inne!
It were al tyme thy tale to bigynne.

Then, there’s the settings within the tales themselves e.g. The Miller’s Tale is set in Oxford, and the Reeve’s, a retaliation, is set just outside Cambridge. The BBC filmed six tales in six different locations on the London-Canterbury route. I’m all set to follow in their footsteps.

So how will location impact on my work? As a reader, I detest long descriptions of places. I claim to have read Hardy’s Return of the Native but in fact, skimmed the entire first chapter, the description of Egdon Heath. Sacrilege! Egdon Heath’s one of the main protagonists of the novel. The Victorians needed those descriptions in the absence of the BBC to do all the hard work for them.  But I’m a lazy, good-for-nothing poet who finds it difficult to make that imaginative leap from long physical description to visual image. One strong metaphor will do quite nicely, thank you. And that’s what I hope to achieve with my adaptations, a strong sense of place through one strong metaphor…

Between London and Canterbury, before the Thames becomes the North Sea, sits the literary capital of the universe: Gravesend. It’s where Pip, Herbert and Magwitch rowed in Great Expectations; where the ship was moored at the beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; where the BBC filmed their adaptation of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale. This town’s gritty, not pretty. It’s where I live and, more importantly, where I write. It will be the setting for one of my own Canterbury tales.

But where will I create this masterpiece of intertextuality? Unlike famous novelists whose studies get photographed in the Guardian’s ‘Writers’ Rooms’, I don’t scrawl longhand in the converted loft space of my Victorian villa, sitting on a distressed brown leather chair that used to belong to Jean Paul Sartre; I write in my through-lounge that looks out onto our garden with its unpruned apple tree, trampoline and sandpit. Not the river view I originally envisaged but strangely inspiring and five minutes from the Thames. Today it’s snowing on damp ground so let’s rewind to three months ago when I took this photo. This is my place:

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’.