Low Life | 26 July 2008

Last month I noticed that the only poem I’ve ever written was a suitable candidate for the local literary festival’s poetry competition, whose theme had been announced as ‘landscape as muse’. So I dug it out of the drawer and had another look at it.

I thought the poem excellent. One of the competition rules was that each entry must have a title, however, and mine was untitled, so I sat down to think of one. After some thought, I gave it the title: ‘Snapshot of my eight-year-old son and Mr Allen standing on a hillside above a bay in early autumn waiting for the albino ferret Fatima to come out of the rabbit hole’. We’d been waiting for Fatima to come out, and my boy and Mr Allen had been standing together a little way away from where I was and admiring the view. Tiny cries of gulls and happy holidaymakers were drifting up from the curving sands below.