When I was eight years old I won my first poetry competition - a limerick writing competition run by Wall's Ice Cream! The prize they awarded me was the set of top ten pop singles in the charts that week...  Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, Knock Three Times, Banner Man...  friends loved it when I brought in those vinyl 45s to school. They were tickled pink when the headmaster, by way of celebration, played them in assembly and I, spurred on by the warm feeling in my gut that listening to those records gave me, went on to become a Heinz Beinz Bard!

Having won another competition when still in primary school, I went along to WHSmith's with my proud mum and dad and, with my winning book tokens, bought my first ever poetry book - The Puffin Book of Verse.  This treasure of yellowing, loose pages gave me hours, days, years of pleasure and to this day, every once in a while, I take it with me to schools where I show it to today's budding writers.

In secondary school and in early adulthood my poetry was private;many poems from these times are secreted in boxes and drawers. I rarely showed my writing to anyone outside the family but must have written some stuff that was okay in school  - I was awarded the Jones' Prize for English when I was in the sixth form.  You've guessed it... more book tokens! This time I used them to buy The Oxford Book of Nineteenth Century English Verse.

Despite my family being proud of my going to Grammar School, my time there was short lived.  The traditional, authoritarian atmosphere of a single sexed grammar school wasn't for me and so, against the advice of the educational authorities, I moved to Fairfax High School where I was to spend many extremely happy years.