It’s traditional for people to be too hard on themselves. As a look at my career trajectory (which reached its stuttering height around 1988, faltered and commenced a steady decline which lasted for 38 years) will show, I’m not one of those people. I had everything I wanted and I didn’t try. Laziness and lack of ambition were all I needed, and as a result I coasted into retirement with very little to show for it but a finely honed ability for world class procrastination.

When the book is closed on my life, it will be with the phrase that often adorned my school reports – “could do better”.

Still, there’s no point worrying now.

However, I must do better in one respect. I took Julia to wood turning this morning, and, as last week, came back by a slightly circuitous route that avoided the queues. As with last week I had a number of thoughts of subjects for poems (including some of the same ones I had had last week) and realised that I had done nothing about it. I’ve written about Air Sea Rescue in WW2 and about the fate of Cromwell’s head after his posthumous execution, but no actual creative writing has been done. This is not good.

At the moment I can pass it off as a change of pace, or relaxation. I have plenty of material in hand and October is a slow month for submissions, but I really have to get a grip after that.

Does anybody want to know what happened to Cromwell’s head, by the way? There’s been a lot written about him while he was alive, but not much about him after he died. To be fair, he did do a lot more while he was alive.