This is going to be a very very short blog.

I’ve just spent about 40 minutes writing an entry and then I lost it so I am really pissed off. I really wanted to start my blog like this.

Hi I’m back on line. We lost contact for a while- did you notice? Our computer went down with a very bad virus and I really though we had lost it all. But it is in the process of being resurrected as you can read I can at last make a blog entry.

Its late so this will be short and sweet.

The publicity is out for the reading at The Troubadour. There is also the poetry party later on the 14 July the theme is Paris. I’ve already started on something – but what shall I read?

I’ve been reading and writing a little. At the moment I'm reading Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, and just before Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude. This is his portrait of his father though he could have been writing just about mine. I read Billy Collin’s new poetry collection – the line between stand up comic and poet blurs even further. At college we’ve been studying Frost, and for the first time for me Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. These poets have been refreshing and challenging, Dickinson's intense, dynamic and powerful writing is disturbing but brilliant.

I've been writing about my dad and still playing around with a poem called Sleepless. Since the computer crashed my writing has almost dried up. Clearly I am beginning to rely on the word processor too much. Sleepless has been fun. Recently I've been playing around with the shape and punctuation of the poem. It is an imagist poem but there is also aspects of stream of consciousness, experimental perhaps.

i am still watching DVD's from Blockbusters. I just can't keep on going there. Stephen reckoned Wimbledon Library has a great collection of videos. So perhaps New Malden Library will have a wider collection of films. We'll see. I think I can add two other films to my top ten. The Philadelphia Story and Terrence Malick's Badlands with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The Philadelphia Story is a film I video taped years ago and thought it was amazing. If I could not sleep I used to come down and watch it. I don't really know what attracts me about Badlands. Perhaps it is the narrator, or the escape from a father into a world of your own making - a secret world. Outsiders.

I hope I can maintain this blog and have some real writer's things of interest to put down. I hope someone else is reading this too. This feels a bit like doing an all night radio programme - you just don't know who is listening. Actually when Steve and I were doing late night shows on Campus Radio we always got a response, even if it was 4 am.

Take care and drop me a line if you can.

D