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Helen Mort: Keeping a Notebook – Young Poets Network

ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk · 756 words · saved by 1 readers

If someone were to burgle my house in Grasmere, they could take my mobile phone. They could take my CD collection, if they could be bothered to carry it. They could even try to take my whippet, Bell: she’d howl so much they’d soon put her back again. But the one thing I’d die without is my notebook. A humble, A5 black book, probably worth less than the average cup of coffee, but full of irreplaceable (albeit often uninteresting) ideas. Somewhere to scribble down the peculiar thoughts that pop into my head on a daily – sometimes hourly – basis, safe in the knowledge that nobody will judge me for them; in fact, perhaps my morbid fear of having my notebooks taken has as much to do with the idea that someone might read them as anything else. So what does this guarded volume contain? Guilty secrets? Semi-precious masterpieces? The answer, of course, is predictably mundane: a mixture of poems-in-progress (peppered with crossings-out and blank spaces where I’m waiting to find the right word),

If someone were to burgle my house in Grasmere, they could take my mobile phone. They could take my CD collection, if they could be bothered to carry it. They could even try to take my whippet, Bell: she’d howl so much they’d soon put her back again. But the one thing I’d die without is my notebook. A humble, A5 black book, probably worth less than the average cup of coffee, but full of irreplaceable (albeit often uninteresting) ideas. Somewhere to scribble down the peculiar thoughts that pop into my head on a daily – sometimes hourly – basis, safe in the knowledge that nobody will judge me fo

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