It's an effort of will, losing weight. A long, hard slog to fit back into the clothes I loved, to achieve the ability to run without breathlessness, to make the world see me as more than some big, jolly bloke who hides behind an even bigger laugh.

Paper everywhere. All the old, dusty and often deeply embarrassing effluvia of a life spent attempting to make words work spread out on the floor in neat, and thus unrecognisable, piles.

Oh no! The worst snow in at least four days. How will Britain cope?

I've always maintained that a good walk in the country clears my head and helps me write, but I've ascribed the creativity to the air, the surroundings, the fact that I'm out of the house and there are new sounds and sights and that all aggravations, obstacles and tedium related to the working day have been left behind. But I've never considered, for one moment, that it's actually the exercise that is the source of inspiration.

I know from experience that when I'm slim, I'm more productive and more easily excited by the prospect of going outdoors, so going back is the best thing I can do. That and ignoring utterly the people who tell me they prefer me the way I don't want to be...

Being so tied up in the written word, I tend to get cross with film adaptations of books, too many of which attempt slavish translations of the 'important' scenes from said literary work at the expense of all the ephemeral detail and internal monologue and dialogue that make the book worth reading in the first place.

Poetry is the art of truth-telling and it takes many forms. Oratorical rhetoric seeks simply to persuade. Whilst there can be no doubt that Obama and his speechwriters have learned many lessons from poetry - most notably the way they boiled down of big ideas into a pithy, accessible and inspiring speech - to suggest that the inauguration speech itself was poetry is simply ludicrous.

I wrote this poem the morning of Barack Obama's election victory, awake at 5.30 a.m. and almost as euphoric as I was when Labour came to power in 1997. We'll see what happens next, but let's hope that Obama is worthy of all the adulation that's been poured his way, and able to float above it.

Comfort, in small doses, is a wonderful thing, but if I have learned anything it is that too much of a good thing is wonderful, but only for a little while