Working on the design for some new pre-school posters has proved a useful reminder to me this week of some important things about writing poetry.

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Having come up with a few possible designs, I decided to ask other committee members and the staff which they preferred best. I ended up with a whole range of different preferences.

The whole exercise was an important reminder to me as a writer (and sometimes competition adjudicator) both about how subjective people's tastes are (if anyone's discovered the secret to pleasing all of the readers, all of the time, please let me know!) and that whatever one is trying to achieve when writing poetry, it is always an act of communication that is never finished until it is read.

Anyway, I've finally narrowed the posters down to two designs now. Hopefully between the two of them, we'll manage to catch most Mum and Dad's eyes!

It has been a frantic but productive week on the poetry front. Inspired by one of the exercise in Julia Casterton's Writing Poetry: A practical Guide, I decided to try reading, listening and editing a poem I'm working on in iambic metre while walking. It worked! I found the pace/beat of walking did seem to help me with the poem's metre. Good exercise too!

Talking of exercise, poetry and pre-school I'm finding I'm so busy at the moment, I've had to adopt a rota system - dropping one different thing each week so that I can fit everything in without dropping anything permanently.

so far it has been working, but it was probably silly of me given this time situation to allow myself onto the Guardian website to check if there was a new poetry workshop. There was. Not only is the theme 'self-portrait', which is also the latest Poetry News members' poems theme (providing two possible uses/outlets for any poems produced) but is also by Michael Symmons Roberts. I am currently reading his new collection Half-Healed and loved his collection Corpus. So there's no way I couldn't be inspired by this challenge!

Obviously, having failed to keep myself away from the temptations of new inspiration, I am now wondering what will have to move next on the rota system to fit this new poem in! But, despite this, I still managed to walk (instead of the quicker drive) the boys to school and pre-school this morning.

In fact, walking home after dropping my younger son at pre-school proved quite amusing, and again inspiring, when an elderly gentleman in a striking boater hat suddenly stopped to stare open-mouthed at the empty pushchair. The bemused and worried look on his face was incredible. I felt quite sorry for him, though the 'naughty' part of me was also tempted to throw my hands up in dramatic dismay and shout: "Oh no, where's he gone? I must have lost him!" I didn't, of course, but I'm sure there's a poem lurking in that incident somewhere - though I may have to tear up the rota!