We are in those leftover days – between Christmas and New Year. A time for taking stock, reducing it, putting it in a tupperware box and storing it in the freezer – or at least that is what I generally do with the turkey bones.

I finished work on 18th December after a very busy few months in the office. I was so tired I would get suddenly lightheaded on the way round Sainsbury’s and wonder if there was something wrong with my health. Looking back on the year it is no wonder I got tired.

This was the year I got active in politics. We began by slithering along the icy January pavements, canvassing door-to-door for Labour at the General Election. I carried on running The Stare’s Nest for a few months after the election, but at the local branch AGM I took the job of Secretary to the Teesdale branch of the party, and I realised I’d got too busy to keep the editing work going; besides it seemed like the quality of poems submitted was diminishing and I suspected the project had run its course. And then a “casual vacancy” came up on Barnard Castle Town Council and I stood, and was elected, on December 10th, as a town council member. If I do that job properly it will take up even more of my time.

In August, I organised a poetry workshop day at the Bowes Museum. Fifteen poets wrote in response to the Yves St Laurent couture exhibition. I think I was the only poet who wrote nothing.

Add to that a house to clean, a garden to manage, an all the concomitant Stuff To Do – we’ve had a lot of decorating done over the last few months – and something had to give. Of course, it has been the writing. I’ve produced very few poems in the last few months, and have done no work on the Great Novel. I was worried that I couldn’t write any more.  But, happily for my creativity, though sadly for my Christmas preparations, I treated myself to a weekend in Grange Over Sands at Kim Moore’s lovely “Poetry Carousel” workshop, and a few poems did pop into my head, proving that with bit of downtime and a relaxing atmosphere, I can get back into the swing of it.

Sixteen days off work over Christmas and we have hosted two drinks parties and three sets of house guests, with all the cleaning, shopping and cooking that involves. Today (Day 11 of my “holiday”) I finished a giant basket-load of ironing and started washing the next overflowing laundry binful of clothes.

This can’t go on! I am going to have to make time to write or I will go mad. Wordsworth famously said that: ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility’.

Somehow, we have to make the time for that recollection, a time to empty our minds of chores and worries. I’m not sure how I am going to manage it yet, but I have to create my own tranquility.