The Poetry Advent Calendar

Historically, I would have described myself as an ambivert - happy at times to be extroverted and just as happy at other times to be entirely introverted spending time in my own company. As I've got older, my introversion is overtaking my extroversion - not helped of course, by time spent in lockdown. It's now the norm for me to stay in and not go out at all, so I often have to be encouraged, or encourage myself, to go outside. And as for social stuff, that's been really very limited for the last two years, and was limited before that due to (willingly) spending most of my time caring for my Mum.

Staying in isn't all bad and it doesn't have to be about being alone. One of the lovely things that happened during lockdown was that my friend, Adrian*, hosted a regular quiz on Zoom. When I started doing the quizzes, I didn't know anyone except Adrian and his family, but soon, as I got put into different teams, I got to meet the other regulars which was a social lifeline to me. And that included the poet, Owen Collins. Sometimes, as part of the quiz interval, Owen would read one of his poems. We haven't done the quiz for some months as restrictions lifted, but we had one last week which was great. And it was during last week's quiz, that I found out Owen does a poetry advent calendar - one poem a day until Christmas Eve. What a great idea! It's rather good and you can find it here. Yesterday's poem alluded to this year's Christmas Tree in Trafalgar Square, hence the picture.

I know Zoom fatigue is very real, but Adrian's Zoom quizzes were/are brilliant. They kept me sane during particularly testing times. I look forward to meeting some of the other quizzers in real life at some point too.

* Adrian runs Minimum Ego and also writes and hosts quizzes online and in person for companies and charities. He's one of my Swan Youth Theatre chums from back in the day.