My black folder was my old treasury of ideas, drafts and cuttings. It was in existence from when I returned from university in 2008 until September 2015. It was very untidy. It mainly consisted of polythene pockets filled with tatty, scribbled-on paper. There were loose sheets floating about in it, usually from when I had jotted down on something as handy as an envelope and I needed to quickly stow it away before it was confused with recycling. There were also some hole-punched sheets properly attached in an attempt to give the folder some real utility, although they had the same destiny as everything else – anonymity in a polythene pocket.

This collection contains all of the poems that I have plucked from the black folder’s obscurity i.e. one-off pieces that haven’t been treated with any special respect as they don’t fit into an over-arching project. That doesn’t mean that these poems aren’t of importance to me. In fact, The Golden Beads was written to commemorate my brother’s wedding, and Disease was an opportune reflection of a debilitating bout of illness while on holiday. It is the nature of these poems, rather than their worth, that landed them in the black folder.

Alas, the black folder eventually came to an end. I now find I am more likely to designate time to writing (at a desk with a cup of tea) and less likely to be found scrawling on the back of a bus ticket on my way home, or in a folder out of a rucksack while mooching around a car park. Sad but true!