On Giving Things Up

13 January – I’ve just found the post below in my drafts folder. I began writing it sometime late last year (I think) but didn’t hit publish. While it’s still January, although the year no longer feels new, I’ll share it.

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For the first time in over 25 years I’m starting 2025 without any caring responsibilities, without any paid work, without a publisher, without a book contract or a commission on any horizon, distant or otherwise. There is no volunteer work scheduled into my diary (actually, I’m still making sandwiches once a month for a Churches Together Hot Soup and Sandwich Rota – free food available in our town every day at 7pm for anyone who needs it), no poetry group to organise, no reading series to run, no online journal to edit, no workshops, paid or unpaid, to plan and deliver.

2024 was the first year in many, many years that I experienced some ill health. In early December I received medical treatment and from mid-December onwards I began to feel much, much better. I’m so grateful to the NHS and to my family, my husband and two grown-up children, who’ve taken care of me so lovingly.

In 2025 my plan is to take things slowly, to focus on my health, physical and mental, and that will involve being offline, picking up a book instead of my phone. I want to read more. In 2024 I started to rebuild my reading stamina and attention span which have both suffered from two decades of phone scrolling. I’m reading short stories and novels again, rediscovering the endorphin hit released in my brain when I lose myself inside the pages of a chunky book.

I’m scheduling in exercise sessions – last year, I signed up for swimming lessons and learned how to do the front crawl and backstroke after a swimming life spent exclusively swimming breast stroke. I tried Pilates but I seemed to aggravate an old knee injury because of too much kneeling. I want to continue to walk daily and to build in some cycling, on my static bike (a great place to catch up on radio dramas and arts programmes) and on a real bike.

I’ve started several writing projects. I’m not ready to talk about them yet, they’re still in development, I don’t want to put myself under any pressure. I can’t say that I’m not excited at the thought of a blank diary and the possibility that I will have time to spend with my own writing.

Last year I enjoyed working on a sequence of poems, working around a theme, and producing my own zine. I loved collaborating with a visual artist, Pauline Scott-Garrett, engaging with some of her ideas in her series ‘Borderland’ and extending my poems beyond that. I loved working with a translator, Lorena Pino Montilla. It was exciting to think of the possibilities for poetry beyond a collection, and bringing poetry, in English and in Spanish, into an art exhibition. It’s exciting to think about other possible spaces for poetry.

13 January

One swimming lesson already completed. I managed ten lengths of front crawl and ten lengths of backstroke. Felt great until mid-afternoon when I crashed! Wishing everyone a good year, better late than never.