Creative Non-Fiction: It’s no surprise that I find myself confronting a lot of hard truths lately. These uncertain times that we find ourselves wading through on a daily basis have that effect on people, I guess. They foster lucid dreams, like when I dreamt of my mother.

‘Adam picked a foxglove one day, up on Dartmoor,’ I said, ‘when he was little. It was really bad.’ I left a gap for my parents to chip in. ‘Don’t you remember?’ I asked, looking at each of them in turn. Dad took a sip of his pint. Mum sighed. Oh, it’s my imagination again. Right. I sat back in my chair. Clearly, they’d hoped that motherhood had put an end to all that.

Creative NonFiction: Home for me, my sister and mum and dad was a ground floor three bed council flat on a new-ish estate in Swiss Cottage with a pocket hanky sized garden. Like everyone we knew, we had Christmas dinner at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, so we could watch the Queen’s Christmas message at 3.

Creative NonFiction: I have based my artistic pursuits on the idea that all art is art, or, art is whatever you want it to be, or, there’s no such thing as bad art. I do not actually believe any of this is true. The truth is that I like looking at the art materials on my desk and thinking “an artist lives here".

Creative NonFiction: I’m desperate for money, and here is an opportunity. I take a photo of the email address with my phone while a man walks behind me.

Creative NonFiction: Celebration Avenue. Victory Parade. Anthems Way. Olympic Village. Olympic sized shopping centre. Olympic Park. Olympic Javelin throwing you into London in record time. Shaving minutes off your journey. Increasing capacity on the network. Room for more. Squeeze in. Hold on tight.

Creative NonFiction: August, 2020. There’s a funfair on the Common. It is only a small one: a few socially distanced rides huddling well away from one another. But it is definitely there. Its placement has a defensive quality, tucked away at the bottom of the hill down by the High Road, surrounded by a temporary fence.

Creative NonFiction: Half way through a story about a child and their canine best friend, I pause to think, “this isn’t going to end well.” There is a peculiar ache to worrying about the fate of a fictional pet, a kind of inevitability that doesn’t quite translate to watching human suffering.

Creative NonFiction: ‘I feel dazed and dopey, my mind a blur of ideas and images’, writes Julia Bell. This state, and its discontents, will be familiar to many readers. With the relentless acceleration of online life over the last decade arising from the ubiquity of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, anxieties of a ‘crisis of attention’ have become commonplace.

Creative NonFiction: ‘Violence gives some men wings, others the bullying power of the privately educated; some it reduces. For me, it is a source of relentless confusion.'

Creative NonFiction: ‘My father and I were both doctors. I use the past tense for my father, Harry Walker, because he died young. For myself, it is because I am no longer a real doctor. I became an epidemiologist and my clinical skills gradually atrophied.'

Creative NonFiction: ‘Living with Dad was a bit like being loaded into a comedy cannon and then fired off to land somewhere, who knows where: in hospital, India, or the wrong school. He had this thing about experience, the necessity to experience life, cram as much as possible into it, and ‘develop the ever-expanding mind,’ as he put it.'

Creative NonFiction: ‘Insidious thing, cancer. I often thought of it as a completely separate entity from my mum.'

Creative NonFiction: ‘Do ghosts exist? Yes, they do. I know this because I'm being haunted.''

Whatever we feel as human beings, some poet down the years has distilled that emotion or experience into its elemental form. Poetry is language at its most perfect, the ultimate diviner of the human spirit. If we need solace, poetry will console us. If we need joy, poetry will take our soul and let us fly.

"I’ve been in prison a week and a stranger keeps telling me he’s going to kill his wife."

Creative Non-fiction: "People have got their corner here, however modest, and they get on with it, despite all that is stacked against them, all that is thrown at them."