Jackie Wills: Bread and butter work

Reading at Brighton Waterstone's. I love readings, giving them and going to them. This is one of the only poetry events in the Brighton Festival. The rest is fiction or celebrities.

I'm sick of literature festivals packed with celebrities. Anyone famous who's picked up a pen is rolled out - like pop star painters at the Royal Academy.

Festival organisers have lost their nerve - they're frightened the public can't make up their minds what's good so they play safe.

16 May

A call from someone I worked with in Surrey. He wants words to go on display panels launching an up-market agricultural brand.

The artwork's been done by sculptor, Walter Bailey. I go through poems.

They want six quotes of ten to a dozen words.

Click here to read poetry by Jackie Wills

19 May

Bread and butter work - a day with six and seven year olds in Worthing.

I'm working with Matthew Sweeney, a fantastic poet who's recently edited the new Faber Book of Children's Verse (the first new edition since 1953).

Matthew intrigues the children with a story about a crow called Jonathan.

24 May

I go down with a cold. Feel terrible. Typical - half term coming up and I've booked a cottage in North Wales.

Cancel a workshop, reluctantly, for Shepperton Women's Cricket Club.

It was a year of the artist project - poems with photos. It's four days work.

25 May

The Club urgently want poems to go with a display of the photos. There are none.

So I write three in a day, e-mail them off! One's about training, another about a girl waiting to bat, a third about the woman who invented the overarm bowl!

27 May

The cottage we're in is part of Ty Newydd, Lloyd George's old house, now a writer's centre. I'm not doing much writing but I call this thinking time!

Some ideas have already cropped up - as they do when you're doing something totally irrelevant.

On the beach I meet a youth worker who lives near Oldham. We talk about the riots and how politicians refuse to see the inevitability of them.

You never meet a politician by accident, do you?

29 May

A beach in Trefor, on the Llyn peninsular. This morning we caught a train up Snowdon, walked down.

The children have never been up a mountain this high.

They're impressed and nervous! It's the only day this has been possible, too overcast other days.

The summit's covered in cloud and is freezing. We walk down towards the sunshine.

Suddenly, we can see Snowdonia - lakes, mountains, outlines of stone walls, shadows of clouds.