The Sonnet.

I'm on a walking and boozing holiday in the Cotswolds with six mum friends. The cottage we've rented is fantastic, the weather is stunning, and there's lots of booze, some of it kindly left for us by the owners. I stick my head in the fridge and stare at the selection. 

"I'm renegotiating my relationship with alcohol," I tell my friends. "So I won't be drinking any of this. I've given up for a while."

"Since when?" says one of my friends.

"Since last week," I say. "Since I woke up with a hangover and a bad back on Friday and read an article about how bad drinking is for the over 40s."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/alcohol-does-body-age-40/

"You're not including this weekend, though, surely?" says my friend.

But I am. I'm trying not to drink for a month, until Christmas. 

"If I wait for an opportune moment it'll never happen," I say. "And I don't want to cave in after only a week."

This is all true, and I feel pretty good on it, but mostly I just feel pleased, with myself.

So, as another of my friends lights the fire in the 'drawing room' and the rest tuck into the lake of alcohol, I sit on one of the plush sofas and sip fizzy water and try to read a collection of sonnets. It's part of my homework for the MA.

It's hard to read poems just to yourself so I start reading them out loud to my friends, as we all pull our knees up towards us, and the fire crackles cosily in the grate. Here's a racy one they rather liked, by Jo Shapcott...

Muse

When I kiss you in all the folding places
of your body, you make that noise like a dog
dreaming, dreaming of the long runs he makes
in answer to some jolt to his hormones,
running across landfills, running, running
by tips and shorelines from the scent of too much,
but still going with head up and snout
in the air because he loves it all
and has to get away. I have to kiss deeper
and more slowly - your neck, your inner arm,
the neat creases under your toes, the shadow
behind your knee, the white angles of your groin -
until you fall quiet because only then
can I get the damned words to come into my mouth.

Before dinner we allocate bedrooms using pieces of paper with names we have invented for the rooms written on them, placed in a hat and pulled out at random. There are seven bedrooms. One we call fish because it has cool fish wallpaper; one we call cold because it's a bit colder than the rest; one we call green because it doesn't have pretty wallpaper but is painted green, and is tiny, and has two single beds, and so on... I don't mind sleeping in any of them except for the tiny green one with the single beds.

I get the tiny green one with the single beds; and it is small, so small that I bang into the wall at the bottom of the bed when I get up in the night to go to the loo.

After dinner, which is very boozy, we retire to bed but I can't sleep. I put the light on in the green room and read about sonnets for a while. I read about the Italian sonnet (or Petrarchan) and about 'the turn' in the sonnet, and about 'the golden section', which is all to do with maths, apparently, and that Italian geezer called Fibonacci. "The golden section is a mathematical ratio of (very) approximately 8:5, or expressed as a decimal, 1.618... It can be defined as follows: if a straight line is divided at the point where the ratio of the smaller part to the larger part is the same as that of the larger to the whole, then that point occurs at the golden section." (Don Paterson.)

This makes my brain hurt, so instead of reading about sonnets I put the book down and try to write one, at 2am, sitting in a single bed, in a tiny green room, where the walls appear to move closer each time I look up at them from my laptop, like in a cell.

Teetotal

It's harder than you might think

to keep refusing boozy drink,

while those around you knock it back

and chide and tempt and give you flack.

But I decide I must steer clear

of wine and fizz and pints of beer,

opting instead to polish my halo

for having the strength to actually say 'no'. 

As night wears on and glasses drain, I sit

at the table feeling strange - and oddly clear headed - 
watching my girlfriends getting totally shredded,

Thinking: it's not a holiday for me but for my liver,

I'm stone cold sober and a winner:
the only one standing after dinner. 

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. Mine's rather more Pam Ayres than Jo Shapcott.