Till Next Year!

Sunday 28th December 2014

Read through my work log in prep for an end of year piece. Haven’t slept much today, although nodded off on the couch a bit this evening. Been out to buy cough medicine for Jenni. She has been unwell all day. Booked another guest for Poetry Jam, ate cowboy hash and lots of stollen cake.

Monday 29th December 2014

Nice cooked breakfast for me and Jenni then some time folding and assembling pamphlets. Think a pro-guillotine job will be best for trimming. Have a bit of a cold returning. Sniffles, temperature, streaming eyes. Have started to put together my next volume of writing – an archive book, taking in extracts from a quarter century of uncollected material. Jenni has been out much of the day. I listened to Kate Bush and The Mission. Sorely tempted to buy a guillotine for my big print runs. Watched tv, mooched about cupboards for nice things to eat. Xmas pudding and custard a little earlier. Porridge for supper. Scraping the barrel for something to scribble, no need to bother. Might read a bit of Ian McMillan or John Lydon. Will be working on pamphlets again tomorrow. Okay. Done. 10.37 pm.

Tuesday 30th December 2014

Snotty beaked blasted wrecked and overheated froze out burnt down. Jesus fucking cold. Fuck right off! Got a bunch of pamphlets stapled and into the book press. Spoke to Griffin Print about getting them trimmed. Sleepy a lot this evening. More material coming together for new book. Jenni has been promoting Jibba Jabba SLAMalgamate online and interest is strong. Charlie Brookers 2014 Wipe was good tonight. Been trying to cut down on the calorific intake. Pizza and chips, ham and cheese toastie. No reading done in the last couple of days. Tomorrow will be more folding and stapling. Maybe a few hours on the new volume. Sick of snotting on. Cold, fuck-off, please! 11.20 pm.

Wednesday 31st December 2014

Well, another twelve months and still in one piece. Got through quite a bit of stuff this year. Forty-two gigs - including appearances at HOT WORDS @ The Chilli, 8 for Bailiffgate (in Alnwick), Material at Blakes, Black Light Engine Room, Alphabetti Soup, 10 Red, Jibba Jabba, Other Voices, Never Mind the Ramones, Star and Shadow; and to finish off it was my privilege to support the mighty Buddy Wakefield at the Cumberland Arms earlier this month. I’ve delivered over 150 workshops for Derwentside Mind, Waddington Street Centre, New College Durham, Colour Your Life (PCP and East Durham Trust) plus evening sessions with the Wednesday Writers and a bunch of Writing Marathons across the region – thanks to all who attended any of the above and the Poetry Jams I hosted throughout the year. I took part in some street poetry in West Denton with Dave Viney and some of Tyneside’s finest – thanks to Dominic Berry for that. I was booked for full-length spoken word shows by Gateshead Library and, bizarrely, Consett Rotary Club – thank you Mark Speeding and Lorraine Weightman, respectively. In May the wonderful Kirsten Luckins of Apples and Snakes sent me and Jenni Pascoe off to a spoken word symposium in Norwich where we saw national standard performers wind each other up in a series of provocations on the nature of our chosen artform, plus some cracking performances from Ross Sutherland and Byron Vincent among others. It was also in Norwich where I stood on a Mindless Talisman Peche II longboard for the very first time. Over the summer I could then be seen padded up to the eyeballs and carving the tarmac in Consett and Blackhill Park on same model until dusk. Standing on a rolling plank of wood in my mid forties wasn’t the daftest activity I took to this year; somehow I managed to get booked (by Aidan Clarke and Annie Moir) as half of a musical duo with Jenni Pascoe, murdering classics by Leonard Cohen and Sinead O’Connor as well as ridiculous duets of The Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Show and Life’s a Happy Song by The Muppets. I gave two of my books to Toyah Willcox after her stories and songs gig in Howden, East Riding; saw SWANS in a warehouse in Byker; Fish (ex-Marillion) at Durham Gala Theatre; and Wayne Hussey of the Mission in a church in Leeds. Once a month from January through to December I did a HOME TOWN SLOG – a writing exercise which involved filling a one hundred page notebook in various venues around Consett in a single day – metajournaling and self-indulgence to the max, but it was a good challenge. In addition to those 1,200 pages I also wrote 1,095 morning pages, kept a standard daily journal and completed the NaPoWriMo 30 poems in 30 days challenge for the fourth year running. I didn’t publish much besides my raw Scribbles from the Brink of Inertia blog notes, but managed to mark National Poetry Day with a little handmade monograph on the theme of memory called “Milking a Joe Brainard Riff”. My little publishing imprint Talking Pen will be publishing poetry by Chris Harland and Jane Burn next year and I have a new book out from Red Squirrel Press – as well as some special editions and bespoke handmade journals. BIGLY THANKS to everyone – writers, performers, promoters, venues, audiences; employers, workshop participants; family and friends – for yet another great year. I look forward to getting out there and meeting more amazing people in 2015, Whatever your dreams, your goals – aim high and keep it going. All the best!