Well the booklet is out and safely at home. As always - for me at least - a couple of mistakes but suprisingly less then others in the past. However still frustrating. For example I missed out a whole poem. I don't know how it happened. It was there in the first mock ups of the booklet but totally absent from the finished booklet. How is that possible??

I can think of some fairly good reasons for not including it - for example it would mess up the overall V shape of the collection and I would need another 4 pages, however it really should have been included.

So here is the poor missing poem

In My Wheelchair, Kingston

A late October, Saturday
the first Christmas crowds
gather in the shopping centre.

Rain and early glitter season the streets.

I’m in my wheelchair,
chest height to the tangled crowd
that glance down at me,
disturbed for a moment.
Horror is in the brief flicker
of their eyes
before they turn away.
Except for the children
eye to eye, face on, honesty,
their open stares
full of terror and fascination
at all my scars on the outside.

I zip myself up
against the growing cold and rain.

Looking at the crowd
is like looking into a mirror.
I see in their faces
my own sad and shocked reflection.

It has been a quiet week. A little writing, some time with the family. Keeping warm. Walking in Richmond Park. Friends. Walking the Millenium Bridge, Tate Modern. Reading.

This half term week last year the same friends we saw this week came to stay. Last year we were in Richmond Park too. What a year!!