There is nothing like being laid low to make a month disappear leaving little sign of any activity whatsoever if you exclude the (rather enjoyable) gorging on afternoon antiques programmes.

So, that took care of part of January and February and then March has just galloped past trying to catch up with all that stuff left to take care of itself – and of course, it didn’t.

Anyway, the bookshop is back under control ( more or less) and I have started to look at my lists of six things.

As the big birthday is now past, time to complete some of these things is galloping away too.

And, always a woman who has bright ideas but no commitment to follow-through, I do feel that this is the year when I really ought to complete something.

( Just in case you need an explanation: to mark by 60th birthday, instead of a big party, I decided to do some things in sixes: visit six islands, see six good films, walk to six venues/places – though my friend who is suggesting we walk from the St Bernard Pass to Rome maybe shooting a little high….)

I also have decided to learn six new things and have already done throwing a pot and am having gardening lessons, have swum a little bit underwater, managed a couple of not too bad poached eggs.

There is a very nice man who fixes wonky our chairs ready for us to re-upholster in my upholstery class and (hopefully) he is going to come and talk to us about how to identify woods.

Yes, of course, I know pine and walnut and probably mahogany but would you be able to spot an ash or elm chair at fifty paces in an auction house? Really?

Anyway, having listened to a radio programme about how good for your brain ( at whatever age you are) to learn poetry by heart, I have decided to learn six poems.

A good idea, but now faffing about wondering which ones…….

I gather the easiest to learn have strong rhythms and rhymes which makes sense.

I am not a great poetry reader – though I wish I was, but then I wish I was a piano player and did pilates for half an hour every morning before having a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and slipping into my size ten dress…..

So, I only have four poetry references in my life.

A Child’s Garden of Verses, my childhood copy still with me or so I thought. But when I went to look for it, I found I had somewhere along the line, thrown it away.

If I had remembered that, I might have rescued a copy or two that has come my way in the Oxfam shop. Now I have to buy it again.

Poems of the Sixties which I have kept since school – even then I wanted to be a poetry reader..

And, for the first time in years, I looked inside to find my younger self.

Trying to understand the way language worked and, yes playing with my handwriting style which I have to say, looks rather like my sister’s is now – now there is a Freudian something.

John Donne – I saw an programme about him when I was an impressionable teenager and have kept a soft spot. Should you want to know more https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/oct/05/john-donne-the-sun-rising

Catullus – I was delighted by how naughty he was when I arrived at university and discovered him, but then I was a sheltered girl.

Catullus’s poems have been preserved in three manuscripts that were copied from one of two copies made from a lost manuscript discovered around 1300 – he lived about 60 BC.

He wrote good stuff:

Lesbia, come, let us live and love, and be
deaf to the vile jabber of the ugly old fools,
the sun may come up each day but when our
star is out…our night, it shall last forever and
give me a thousand kisses and a hundred more
a thousand more again, and another hundred,
another thousand, and again a hundred more,
as we kiss these passionate thousands let
us lose track; in our oblivion, we will avoid
the watchful eyes of stupid, evil peasants
hungry to figure out
how many kisses we have kissed.

So, one from each of those poets gives me four poems and I am up for suggestions on the other two.