I wake at 7.30am and by 9am I am on my bike speeding through Hackney, gliding  into the Regents canal entrance  near Borough market up and off the canal into Angel, zooming past Saddlers Wells Theatre  then  Exmouth Market, swooping to Holborn where I get a freakin’ puncture.  I dive  into the bike shop in Holborn. It takes seven minutes to change the tyre.  I speed across Waterloo Bridge at The Thames  on to The South Bank.  Must get there. At 9.30am my poem E mail is being placed upon the Counterweight of the Glass Lift that serves all six floors of The Royal Festival Hall. But all this zooming, gliding diving swooping and a speeding! It’s  a bit much really! 

Some time ago I  identified the lift counterweight as  a place for a poem, part  of my poems as landmarks project.  On the second floor The lift is all opened up.  It’s ceiling is now the workmans floor and standing at the back of the shaft is the gigantic counterweight. It seems in suspense and slight shock at her unusual visitors, overall clad  workmen and women.  The counterweight is  about fifteen feet tall, a burnt red colour and made of solid steel.The mood is whispery.  It feels like the lift is being operated upon, it’s lungs opened up and its vital organs exposed.    

The text is lying on the floor outside the lift ready to be transferred. But there are mistakes.  Hilary, once part of productiona t the south bank and now part of Learning and Participation  goes into emergency production mode and within half an hour the designers have been called and the missing text is being made, printed and biked over.  The mistakes, no doubt are my fault, due to some textual errors in the original script.  There are so many reasons why this is the right place for a poem to be -upon the counterweight.

I have to leave so I shalln’t see the text going up. Hilary has kindly said she would take pictures and so I will get one or two up on here when I pick them up. We have a coffee and  I bike it back across the river and back to the beautifully named Angel. I  meet musician and composer Laka D for coffee. We wrote The Olympic Torch song together.  We are going to write some more stuff too,  which is perfect. 

After an hour or so I then bike it to Toynbee Studios in Spittlefields to see Gil Lloyd of Artsadmin. We  have lunch and discussions about various developments. Gil is project manager for some of the larger projects I do. And then, home.  Our garden is being designed. It’s a wonderful feeling of positive growth as this week develops. I receive the scripts for the playwrights competition for The Royal Court Theatre,  a request for a piece on The Guardians Newspapers web site and I receive no telephone from America.  My phone was posted from America two weeks ago and it still has not arrived.