Yesterday I went to the T. S. Eliot prize shortlist readings. Ten poets reading two or three poems each. It made me want to read more – I’m in the middle of two seven hundred page novels at the moment, so I’m not sure how that will happen – although poems tend to be shorter – and to write more. Mostly it made me want to write more. But what shall I write. I’ll put these words on my little blog, but what about the big stuff? The short novel about my son’s suicide that I can’t seem to finish, other unfinished novels – I think there are four; all the short stories that rest somewhere unread; poem after poem after poem, all somehow incomplete; new things that I might write?

At this point in my writing process I go out into a garden: my garden, your garden, any garden, any outside, really. Just out. Every blog needs a picture, that’s my excuse. Today I have found some flowers that grace the winter: viburnum farreri, mahonia japonica, hazel. And the gnomes are always up to something. The picture I will choose for this blog is the tiny female flower of the hazel. It is so small and so beautiful. I remember my mother pointing it out to me some winter day long gone, and I always look, every year. It’s a small winter pleasure that is somehow monumental.

I’ve just remembered I bought seville oranges yesterday. Now there is something I know I can do. We started the last pot of last years marmalade on Christmas day and it’s gone now. A pot of marmalade is a poem, isn’t it, one that can be both consumed and renewed? And I will read some poems, in between Dombey and Son and Termination Shock. My favorite from last night was Fran Lock, but what about the dark mechanical poems of Abigail Parry, and, for a world that might contain hazel flowers, Jane Clarke.

The winner of the T. S. Eliot prize will be announced tonight. I feel as if I have won something already, just by being there, being here, having a garden, writing this.

And having marmalade to make!