how DO we do it

Well, it's easy to keep up print appearances if you're home all day, no matter how ill! Back out in the world for two days, all the energy one can muster goes into making it through the day without a lie-down.*

Of course, this is the same old bugbear as always; for many years people have been saying to Ms B: "How do you do it?" And for many years the answer has always been: "I don't know." But of course it's a simple combination of focus, energy, determination, etc. Every working mother knows this. And paradoxically many people do find that the more you have going on the more you can do.

Two days into being back at work, therefore, and feeling like I've "done nothing" - meaning what exactly, I don't know, except that I have stacks of bills and papers and have to go see the bank about something but have been too tired to run around in my lunch hour, and still don't have a good list of magazines to send poems off to, which needs doing badly - two days in, as say, I've almost edited an entire document; I've had some big fat dynamic ideas and started to sell them around the organisation; I've written a good start on a fun (yes!) new poem, which I think will come out quite ambitious but is falling off my pen; I've finally found my Primo Levi quote (I had to buy the book, again, & strangely it was not easy to find) and put it into the article, which I can finally send off final edits to the editor; I've read this great article, about a police force in Mexico turning the tide on crime by teaching their officers to read; and this one, which confirms me in my hatred of Starbucks; I've been in yet another of those arguments about poetry sales versus "what readers want" etc; I've read some Auden (this reader wants Auden); I've read a pile of poems a friend sent me; I've texted the 15-year-old Rock God in France (no reply; he's back Saturday night), and kept up with the others at their father's house; and I've been for an after-work drink (my first glass of wine in 10 days!) in Thistle Hotel bar at Victoria Station, which is a fab place to meet for drinks, actually. You get that big old-fashioned hotel feeling, which is always a tonic; I could have been Miss Marple, sitting there. Next time I'll take some knitting.

Oh, but the trip home: I just wished I had a room.

* nb this turns out to have been the stones of gall.