I have been trying to feel miserable this morning. Maybe it is the weather. April has been hot and sunny but the forecasts are for cold weather coming in tomorrow with rain and clouds. I have got used to that languorous feeling when the temperatures rise and you are tempted to bury your work until they drop again.

T.S. Eliot, one of those impossible acts to follow, always comes into my head at this time of year with those haunting words from the beginning of his masterpiece The Wasteland. It is unfortunate that this week I am trying to put together a collection of poems for a competition which I know I will not win and Mr Eliot’s ghost walks back and forth taunting me with his genius.

He picks up my mood, or maybe he even created it in the first place.

I am not growing lilacs out of the dead land, my equivalent of Eliot’s lilac is a new thrillingly purple magnolia but it does what T.S.Eliot says. It has forced itself into my head as a symbol for some of the darker poems that I am putting together for this collection.

The air is hanging heavily this morning, daring me to enjoy this last hot day and to remember that May is about to seduce me even further with England’ s countryside erupting with green foliage and the best of its native wild flowers. That purple magnolia bush talks of a different beauty – something darker and much more ambiguous.