Yesterday the winners of the Foyle Young Poets 2007 were announced. I'm in the top fifteen again, and I guess I can officially post about it now. It's my third year in the top fifteen (I was top 100 the year before that) and as it was the last year I could enter it's quite nice to end it on top, or something.

The awards ceremony was in the evening, and it was lovely. I left school at about lunchtime (after a slightly bizarre session with an Oxford outreach officer in the careers office) and caught buses home, got changed as soon as possible and then dashed back in to catch the half two train to London Liverpool Street. I was wearing a dress and some very sequinned gold shoes, and if any photos exist of me that aren't completely hideous then I'll possibly put one up here to demonstrate. Don't hold your breath, though, I am recovering from a cold and I am not very photogenic.

You'd think that as this was my fourth FYP awards thing (well, fifth, really, as there were two events in 2005) I'd be used to it by now. I'm really, really not - I was still ultra-nervous and probably very annoying. I did talk to a lot of people, and I drank too much of this weird ginger and elderberry drink and I didn't eat much at all (although I did accidentally insult the food while someone was trying to give us caviar or something, so that was embarrassing). The worst part was when we were sitting down and our poems were being read out and my eyes suddenly started being like OH MY GOD THE PAIN ETC so I was trying to like, stop them hurting while crying with laughter at a man reading out Annie's poem, which you should all read here (you should read all the rest while you're there, although I'm not going to force you to read my rather twee effort) and it was a bit of a crisis. But then my eyes stopped hurting and it was okay again.

I was also interviewed for a podcast by Tom Chivers of penned in the margins, which was a bit weird, as I'd never been interviewed before. It was nice, though, I think I went went on about books a lot. When the podcast surfaces I'll try and remember to post a link here, if anyone's interested.

Anyway, then it was onto networking. I haven't posted about pomegranate here yet, which is utterly shameful, and I think that everyone should go there NOW and read everything (although again, feel free to miss out my poem there too, it's really twee again, sigh!), but we handed out lots of flyers for it and told people to read it and submit to us, like, NOW, so hopefully we'll hear from a few new voices and stuff. If you're reading this and you somehow haven't yet been and marvelled at Pomegranate, then where have you been?! Go there now, anyway.

I was a bit sad about coming home again. Rosie and I sat on the train and moaned about Ipswich - it's not a very exciting place ever, really, and especially not if you want to be involved in poetry. There are never any poetry readings here anymore (PoetryIpswich mysteriously died, not that it was very exciting anyway) and I can hardly ever get to them in London (I've been to ONE, and that was ages ago) and much as I love Waterstone's (I work there and it's awesome) it doesn't have any poetry magazines other then Poetry Review and so I can never get Magma or Smiths Knoll (?! I can never find it ANYWHERE, and it's based in Suffolk! What is going on?!) and all the poetry reading groups in Suffolk are ages away and full of old people and I can't get there anyway. When you look up Suffolk on poetry websites for listings or whatever, Ipswich usually isn't on there. It's all Aldeburgh and Felixstowe and Bury St. Edmunds, which are nice places but they're all posher than Ipswich and it's not plausible for me to get to them for events in the evening, as I can't drive and the buses here are particularly rubbish. So Ipswich, poetry-wise? It's dead.

It's dead for pretty much everything else too, as there are no alternative nights (oh I think there might be one actually, but it's very late and I have school / work and god I hate being young sometimes) and there's only one cinema and there are no second-hand bookshops (although obviously Waterstone's has everything anyone needs) and the Wolsey Theatre is nice but small and the library has a patchy selection of books and ugh.

In just under a year I'll be out of here, I hope.

On a less whingey note - I read Luke Kennard's The Harbour Beyond the Movie cover to cover today, after flicking through it last week. It's completely amazing, original and sharp and beautiful and also really really funny in a really strange way. I'm really gutted that it didn't win the Forward. When I get paid, I think I'll have to buy his first collection!