Although I have ‘dabbled’ in poetry for many years, it wasn’t until I got together with two local poets for critical sessions ‘The Friday Morning Poetry Club’, that I began to write seriously. Sensible folk, they finally urged me towards Poetry Aloud and since that first meeting in April 2010, my writing has evolved from an interest into a passion.

I have always had a creative instinct, but it wasn’t until a superb teacher (at night classes in 1989) introduced me to Wilfred Owen that I realised that poetry was the creative medium I’d been looking for. After many false starts, here I am writing regularly and reading my efforts to alive audience. Often, they are still alive when I’ve finished.

Ideas drift by like pollen on the wind. Some you let fly past, someone else’s territory. Others you catch, they take hold and flourish. I write about anything which interests me. Much about dementia (Alzheimer’s has my mother), the natural world (amateur ornithologist) and sometimes music (ageing Indie Rock fan).

I like to be consumed by ideas. Writing poetry is a feeling like no other I know.