Not that I am doing my mentor’s job, but I couldn’t resist marking out the bits I’m dissatisfied with. I’ve noticed that a lot of my rough pieces sound good, but are shoddily constructed. Look at the shoddy structure of this poem. Shoddy, shoddy. Anyway, this is more about the Cowley Road. It really happened: I was standing there minding my own business and a boy stuck his finger up at me. Well, I didn’t take it seriously and we had a right joke flipping each other off – him on the bus, me on the street. I might have taken it as a death threat in London. For whatever reason, our contempt for each other was humorous, silly but strange enough for me to remember. Not sure it warrants a full poem, though…

So! Work in progress. What has Jay been writing?

So. My time in London has come to an end and I’m starting up again in Oxford. This happens to be where I live at the moment because I’m a student. The weather was so amazing today that I couldn’t resist cycling up to the community garden to take a look. I’m meeting with the people who work there on April 17th and will probably spend a good few days there generating new material. I’ve got the winter part down – snow, sludge etc – but I’m wondering what I’ll write about for summer. I think of it as a black month. Things getting too ripe and fat. I seem to associate warm weather with scenes from Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971).