Polly Clark/Fielding Foundation

I got an e-mail from Polly asking me for a 75 word biography and photo for the Fielding Foundation site for the April 2009 course.

This makes the fact that I'm going at all start to feel horribly real and trying to extricate myself from things around here is getting all the more difficult, what with my MIL's house selling, which means we now have to empty the place by mid May and my FIL's hip op, no he's not a rapper, now happening on the 15 April.

My family all have a great capacity to bury their heads in the sand as things with the speed and force of a runaway steam train come thundering towards them out of left field. I'm not entirely sure what the evolutionary benefits of this trait are, nor do I have it in the great spades that my father did, but it does lurks within me and I do deploy it against the things that I find most scary.

I booked this course a year ago, for the very reason that I wanted to have one week where all I had to think about was me. But I'm now starting to feel selfish, with a large dose of blind panic thrown in for good measure.

On a more upbeat note Lucy and I have an overspill piece at postal poetry from our "mutating the signature" collaboration, my photo/her poem. And my friend and soon to be published poet, Irene Brown and I have both got poems into this collection , a poetry and film project about Edinburgh using 100 poems about the city that will be turned into film shorts. We applied at the 11th hour, so I'm 98 and Irene is 97 I think, but the company is very fine.