Woke with two ideas for poems this morning. Also feeling better than I have felt for at least a week. Spent the morning getting these down. One is about saying things backwards (as in the poems by Pascale Petit and Joyce Harjo plus the one I had published years ago) the other is sort of a Pandora's box thing.

Walked again by the sea and had a coffee on the pier. Otherwise little to report. Hung out, spoke on the phone to Mum and to Sarah about her novella which she has only two days to finish.

Reading a grimly enjoyable book called Autobiography of a Geisha by Sayo Masuda. It describes her life as an illiterate geisha who made her "debut" i.e. started sleeping with customers in 1940. Interested by how the war had little effect on her until in the week before it ended, the house she had just moved into was burned down in a firebomb attack.

I hadn't really experienced the war in any direct way, and so I didn't understand clearly what it meant for the war to end. But if this was what war was like, I thought, why couldn't it have ended a week earlier? Then our house wouldn't have burned down.

Interesting how the war was so completely separate from her experience.