Posted: 17/08/2012 at 21:24
My poems usually wake me up in the middle of the night begging to be written and refusing to let me go back to sleep, but the hours I spend in my own garden and the Bristol Botanic Garden doing repetitive but pleasant tasks like weeding are when the thoughts that demand to be written down are formed in my mind. As a younger woman going for a long country walk would do the same. As for mod. cons, Kate, I had no electricity or running water in our tenement till I was 15 and my parents rented a council flat. Hard work for my mother with three children to keep clean but she managed it. There was no garden but plenty of hills to roam around and pick blackberries in. I managed to write poems then too - you can do a lot of thinking picking blackberries.
