Sunday Scribblings: The book that changed everything

It was the strangest place to find a book. In fact, it was the strangest place on earth simply to wake up in the morning, a plush, five-star business hotel by a lake in the middle of the Chinese countryside. Its whole purpose was the hosting of conferences and isolated retreats, and the shabby little town that had sprung up next to it was purely to house workers for the sprawling, decadent palace of a hotel. As a new postgrad, I'd thought myself lucky to be invited to a meeting in such an unusual setting, and to be able to travel so far from home, but was beginning to feel like a fish out of water.

There was nothing to read. I was sick to death of research papers with more equations than writing, but they were the only things in a language I understood. The town had no bookstore, almost no shops at all. And then I found it. Tucked away in a corner, apparently abandoned by some previous guest, hidden from the cleaners like some forbidden political treatise.

“The Ode Less Travelled” by Stephen Fry. Guiltily, feeling like some dissident rebel, I tucked it into my bag to read on the plane.

Right from the start, I was hooked. The clear passion of the author for poetry, the encouragement to write, to not be afraid, to not mind the quality of the result, but to revel in the fun of putting pen to paper. And the introduction to technique – despite years of English lessons at school I'd never even heard of metre before. I'd always struggled so much when being presented with a blank page, and here finally was some help.

"However well or badly we were taught English literature, how many of us have ever been shown how to write our own poems?

'Don't worry, it doesn't have to rhyme. Don't bother with metre and verses. Just express yourself. Pour out your feelings'.

Suppose you had never played the piano in your life.

'Don't worry, Just lift the lid and express yourself. Pour out your feelings'.

We have all heard children do just that and we have all wanted to treat them with great violence as a result."

There wasn't time on the short flight from Kunming to Hong Kong to read the whole book, let alone attempt any of the exercises. But just dipping into it put a whole load of ideas into my head.

I'd organised a few days holiday in Hong Kong, a respite after the intellectual rigours of the conference. So the next day, sitting in a park in Kowloon, with flamingos in the foreground, skyscrapers behind, I took out my travel journal. And instead of writing “I see flamingos and skyscrapers, what a strange combination”, I thought for a moment and began.

“There once was a bird called Domingo...”

My notebooks and journals have been filled with poetry in the two years since that trip to China. Now I'm even inflicting it on others, through the blog. Whether the results are any better than the plain old prose I used to produce, I can't say. But it's a hell of a lot more fun to write.