Arrive at 10am. Spend an hour answering emails and chatting to Schlomo who is still high from the weekend performance with Martha Wainwright and all. I hear it on his recording and it sounds like it was a treat! Schlomo is good people.   

At 11am meet with Lucy Macnab of Learning and Participation. We go through some of projects. First for the storytelling chairs. I choose a story which will be recorded next week – 13th – the recording will be placed inside specially commissioned chairs for children to listen to. Storytelling chairs.  Magical.

Next week on Friday The Poetry Society are coming down to The South Bank. Next July they are doing a series of three events where a writer describes contemporary writers they like. I’ll find more out in a weeks time when we meet. It’s not unlike our Presiding Spirits series.  

We discuss The Lift Poem, that is the poem to be placed on the lift Counterweight in the Royal Festival Hall. The poem is being sent to JCB who sponsor the lift.

There has been a lull in the Poems For The Workers. It’s about one and a half months since I last sent a poem for all the workers of the South Bank. I think it was becoming easily ignored.  But the truth is that maybe I wasn’t giving it the thought it deserves

We’ve revised the Poems for The Workers process and now ALL the workers (from security guards right up to the executive producer) receive a poem  It shall from today circulate once per month. There are some that receive the poem with their wage packets , isn’t that brilliant  and  Today the poem has circulated. It’s written by Benjamin Zephania entitled  Headlines and is from his latest book Teachers Dead which I reviewed on the Simon Mayo programme on radio five last week.  It’s the perfect choice and my inbox is receiving feedback already.

“…. I love your poems can we have them more often” says one

At 12.15 Lucy whizzes away and so do I, to Oxford Street to buy some stuff on a  lunch break.  1pm have a dynamic meeting with the wonderful Sarah Sansom from learning and participation. We are discussing The Olympic Torch Song for which I am going to write some lyrics and Laka D shall do the music to be sung by the children of Lambeth.

We finish at about 2pm and I walk to the Offices or The Matrix or The Chicken Hutch to see Maxine Penney the literature assistant who tells me she is leaving on 21st December.   Maxine shows me how to work the calendar system in Outlook express so that I can let people know when I am in and when I m not in.   This system is second nature to Maxine – it isn’t to me.  I realise that this is how much of the organisation speaks to itself.

Pop down to see Amelia in Marketing.  My influence is within the curation of the January to April events listing. I am pleased with the inclusion of my  introduction text in the brochure. Which speaks of both immigration literature and reading. I will be interested in the public reaction.  

The literature  brochure is now headed  LITERATURE AND SPOKEN WORD. Up until now it had been LITERATURE AND TALKS.   This is the influence of Martin Colthorpe head of literature.