This is the sort of thing you have to think about when writing a play or a novel. Currently, I don’t count lengths as the numbers rattle round my brain and I get a headache from trying to remember if I am on 24 or 17. Instead I like my mind to wander and see what random strokes of inspiration emerge from the depths. On this occasion I had a long internal debate about whether it was legal for the under 16s to have tattoos with parental consent. Could you get a situation where some tattoo crazy folks turned their kid into a circus freak, a bit like the Strongest Boy in the World? Would the authorities be able to stop it? Or is it simply illegal for any minor to have a tattoo? Then I saw this skinny boy running around the side of the lido, a water pistol in each hand, and a huge red dragon tattoo that covered his entire back. He can’t have been more than 8 and a half. My jaw dropped. Not because I had seen a tattooed child, but because of the order of events. I did not see the boy before I started thinking about tattos. The trigger was a guy at the side of the pool with a tattoo. Of course if I’d seen this boy subconsciously beforehand I wouldn’t have known I’d seen him, so therefore I will know only the order of events as they consciously occurred. I think now is the time to say it was a fake, the boy was wearing a transfer tattoo.

Bumped into my writing buddy Malika at Brixton station the other day and had a snatched buddy session on the bus as the tube was closed down. We agreed we want to up our game and will send eachother 3 poems per week while she is in Trinidad. I’m still struggling with my second poem from last week – well not struggling, but there’s been research, and, through no fault of my own (okay it was my idea to frame it as a letter to Old Nick) it’s turned into something of an epic. So three poems (even in draft form) will be a real hike uphill. Or a walk in the park. Good weather has made me crave air con like a true continental.

Also trying to work out when I should run off to the Pyrennese as an alternative to the Rare Books reading room. Ryan Air holds my destiny in its green livery. Although there’s something very galling about paying more than 5p to travel Ryan Air.

Writing to order is a different game, but I’m just getting in to my stride. Week started well: Monday morning I allowed myself the ultimate luxury and went to see Pirates of the Caribbean II for the annual Depp-fest. Keira Knightley managed to make kissing Johnny look almost arduous, so A for effort. Perhaps she should have practiced on Keith Richards (who JD based the character on apparently) first for the full method experience. Anyway, all sour grapes of course, I’m sure she’s an excellent actress. What stuck in my mind though was the girl in the Ritzy foyer, begging the security guard to let her use the loo. ‘How can you be so cruel?’ she cried, as he ushered her out the door. ‘Imagine if it was your sister.’ Where do the homeless go if the folks in Micky D’s or KFC catch them on their way in?

Other news: have been handling lots of very old books in the British Library, which, despite the weather is full to bursting. One from 1656 – there’s something so exciting about having a book that old in your hands, although I did worry it might be carrying ancient bubonic plague spores. Actually it turns out the Tradescants, the subject of my enquiries, endured their fair share of skulldugery and adventure, and even encountered some Barbary pirates on the way. Which means that POTC2 and the Depp-fest could be described as a necessary research activity.

Still not got that ‘do all my work in the park’ down yet, but I’m working on it.

Yesterday I decided to try some aggressive bloggerteering. Having never checked my stats, this was something of a first. I was listening to Radio 4 (again) whilst finalising my Plastic Bags Are Evil entry when the announcer said something along the lines of ‘for further info check out the first ever blog called Planet Earth Under Threat at blah blah BBC blog blah’. So I instantly titled the entry and rubbed my hands in anticipation of the thousands of Radio 4 listeners I was going to divert cunningly to the blag. I then googled ‘planet earth under threat’: the BBC blog came up and numerous other environmental sites. So I tried ‘planet earth under threat + plastic bag’ before resorting to ‘+Tooting + lido + Brockwell). So no joy there, this blogging lark is obviously more complex than I thought. Perhaps these experts are actually paid for some form of expertise other than simply googling. Any tips on world domination please do let me know. Perhaps I need to start a double life, poet by day, porno dwarf movie editor by night. Or I need to swap a sonnet for a 100 foot yacht.

The best I can manage at the minute is to report that our cat has a stalker. We’ve been dining out on this rather domestic revelation for about a week. And when I say a stalker I’m not joking. While we were away, reports filtered through of a feline photo shoot out the front. Apparently, a party of Italian tourists were crowded around His Lordship oohing aahing and snapping. Then last week, a man appeared at the back gate. ‘Does Charlie live here?’ he asked. ‘I’m his owner’ I announced rather grandly. The man then approached with a small wallet and handed it to me. ‘It’s for Charlie’ he said, ‘For Charlie’. Inside were a selection of prints from the shoot. There was Charlie Rolling Over Having His Belly Rubbed, Charlie Looking Like the Fattest Cat in the World Rather Than the Longest Cat in the World, and another, Charlie Stalking About Looking Mean and Moody which I liked best. He then declared there would be more, and duly, more arrived the following week. This time a teak framed print with the stalker’s hand chucking his chin, and a small album of additional prints, none of which were for us, but, he hastened to add, ‘for Charlie’. Our cat doesn’t actually talk as far as I know, so I suppose he knew his name from another member of the on-street fanclub – probably the people who insist on feeding him at number 15. Or another catless freak that can’t get a moggy of their own for some mystifying reason. All this attention has done nothing for poor Caspar next door, who has taken to stealth raids through our cat flap and pissing on the bedroom floor in a bid to salve his wounded ego.

Of course this would never quite make it into a poem, as cats and poems don’t mix unless you are very very serious and/or are TS Eliot. Women + cats + poems are even more impossible. While I was in Greece I did write about a lamb, but it was a disaster. I already (drunkenly) set myself some pretty tough exercises involving PR & several individually addressed poems last night, now I’ve got to add kittens to the mix. I shall update on progress as, when and if it occurs.

I worry about the state of the oceans. We went to Camber Sands last Sunday. It was crowded. The water was warm, the sky was blue, the sand dunes were sand dunes, and the tide went in and out fast. We moved three times as it swirled back towards the shore bringing with it a flotsam of Stella cans and plastic bags. There were people who just let their litter blow away across the beach without so much as a second glance. Then on Midweek the person who is standing in for Libby Purves interviewed a round the world Yachtswoman who said that the ubiquitous plastic bag makes it out even to the middle of the Atlantic, there’s a trail of rubbish miles long. I am bordering on obsessive when it comes to plastic bags, and refuse them wherever possible. If I got to do Room 101 with Paul Merton I would put plastic bags in it. One of my favourite bands when I used to have things like favourite bands was a punk outfit called X-Ray Spex (I sold their only, great and very rare album Germfree Adolescents to feed the electric meter when I was a student). Anyway, I’ll probably never get over it, but on this album Poly Styrene sings/screeches ‘my life is like a plastic bag’. How could your life be like a plastic bag? Was it empty? Was her life full of leaking cartons of semi-skimmed milk and melting Soleros? Not that they had either thing back then – in fact, in those days the bag was probably full of glue. So, there you go, plastic bags lead to misery, death and drug addiction, they suffocate small children and cute creatures, they are destroying the environment, and the handles dig in to your fingers and hurt/break if you put anything heavier than a bag of Quavers in them. Some are even branded with evil logos (Posh Burberry and Chanel status bags are also included, particularly if they have SALE on them in large red lettering to prove that you can only shop there with a discount.)

Anyway!!! Enough! Now you know why I am called bLaglady and not baglady. NEXT! Ah yes, back to the water. The calming lap of pale blue chlorine and pensioner piss. Swam this morning, in Tooting Lido – which is so different to Brockwell Lido, or Brixton-Sur-Plage. Tooting is very long and full of serious swimmers, all members of the South London Swim Club. These guys break ice in January and they want you to know it. Well, actually, that’s Hampstead Ponds, they are the true hardcore, the don’t even do pools. The Tooting lot all say ‘Morning Tony’, or ‘Morning Arthur’ because of course they’re not all called Tony, but they do all seem to know each other. Shaved men in Speedos do press-ups from the ladder rails at the side. There were wetsuits and an art installation at the bottom: a strip of reflective material, reminiscent of an oil slick. I borrowed Shade’s goggles and saw myself swim breaststroke and hold my breath. I have never seen myself swim from below and above at the same time before. Tooting has trees and a train line round the edges, Brockwell is overlooked by tower blocks and is full of fit Latinas on parade who look like they’ve had boob jobs but probably haven’t. At Brockwell I wear my bikini, at Tooting my second sense told me to bring a boring blue one piece. Bugs float by and you have to watch what you swallow – that goes for both pools.

I don’t think I can get this watery entry to return, neatly, to the state of the oceans. Too many tangents, too many plastic bags, billions and billions of them, a whole sea of plastic bags, only blue ones, because that is the colour of the sea, and swimming pools, and that’s how we’ll know it’s the sea, because the plastic bags will be blue.

Now the hot spell has subsided it’s time to get down the park. No, I mean, now the hot spell has subsided I can stop worrying about having to tan while I write and sit at my desk. In the park. Reading back over a few entries I note I declared I would keep track of the writing process. Well, it’s an odd one. People say things to me like, ‘you don’t work now do you?’. I’ve always felt that work couldn’t possibly be a truly enjoyable thing, and now, for the first time ever ‘work’ is doing the thing I like best, writing poems. It’s strange though. Writing poems, in fact writing full-stop, can be a painful process. It’s like the lower body blitz class I do in Brixton Rec: you almost don’t arrive but finally get there just in time, then you feel like you’re going to die but you know it will all be worth it in the end: you will be slimmer, and maybe, in a hundred years, your stomach will be as flat as Jenny the tutor’s. Well I produced a poem yesterday. And that feeling of ‘end product’ was a relief and an excitement. After the last meeting I had with Bad Cop Mentor I was terrified it was going to commit loads of crimes – the poem that is. But the terror also freed me up somehow. I was struggling with the end though, and then one of the Space Cadet Crew rang through, we talked amateur quantum physics, and the next thing you know, voila! A poem. Now on to the next one.

A kitsch too far? I bought this from a redneck roadside garage on Route 66. I had a long internal debate as to whether I should give money to the people that designed and manufactured this monstrosity, but decided a little bit of potted contemporary history was worth it. I did however negotiate a small discount, or get a free Michelob Carb-Lite beer or something from somebody with a thin face and rotten teeth playing a banjo. Well, that’s all right then, at least I didn’t pay full price. I can’t be arsed to write a mini-essay on the pros and cons of the dear old USA. What’s to say: ‘nice canyon, I loved the movie, some of my most adored and wonderful friends are American, shame about the genocide, slavery, global imperialism, but what makes Britain any better anyway’? Ooops, I just wrote the mini-essay. I’m off to write some poems in the park. And finally, my favourite ever (mis)quotation, which could be a possible 25th amendment: ‘If everyone who had a gun shot themselves, there wouldn’t be a problem.’ John Lennon.

Dear Blagettes,

sorry for the long silence, but I was off swigging raki

and writing the odd poem on the terrace.

Climbed some big mountains, and got vertigo at 7500 feet.

Animals were everywhere. I saw a whale from the ferry, but despite keeping an eye out, failed to spot one single hen.

Although goats have eaten most of the island, they were not responsible for the lack of chickens; all fowls have been locked up in coops as part of new birdflu legislation.

I found a long, black vulture feather and brought it back home with me.

The girl in the shop where I bought these peaches had just arrived from Athens for the summer. Students are fighting to save the free education system and have occupied all the university campuses.

She showed me two huge bumps on her arm and a bruise on her back where the riot police had hit her with a truncheon.

I popped up North to see my mum who was on an all-in package near Malia. I stayed at the hotel and got a red wristband which I tried to disguise with a wooden elasticated bracelet I bought in a souvenir shop.

I took her for bougatsa in Iraklion. I didn’t go into Knossos, but this is the palace junkyard round the back. It’s heartening, somehow, to see priceless antiquities treated with such insouciance.

We also went to a strange open-air museum. One of the exhibits was the world’s first jet-ski. I tried the real thing on the beach, and crashed and crashed across the waves, which was wonderful. I did not actually crash, although I was reckless. Lady Bling informs me jet-ski crashes can be fatal, so I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time. I can now be in a James Bond film though, as being able to jet-ski is obviously prerequisite.

This is Dave Swann’s idea of heaven. Let’s face it we all like cash and Dave describes himself as a ‘pie poet’, so his heaven it must be!

I love love love airports.

They are the Grace Kelly of transport hubs.

I had time to kill so spied on a few people.

These two said their big goodbye.

What is wrong with this picture?

The ladies in green and the flowery suitcase.

Airports are a bit like hospitals, but without the sick people.

There’s a sense of order and security. Everyone has a uniform and a purpose.

I prefer to travel by train and boat. And of course, jet-ski.

As is the case with sterile environments, the food is average at best. Chania bus station cafe serves snails.

Not that I ate any though, I had chicken in the absence of live hens.

I can’t remember my inflight meal.