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idea, I often wasted it by failing to invest it with the unimpeded intellectual energy needed to turn it into an effective piece of writing.

It was James who, with immense tact and patience, brought me out of this. Within a matter of months, my "blanket of abstractions", as he termed it, had been cast aside — with remarkable results. Several of my poems were published in good magazines.

In the early 1970s, James and I went separate ways. I brought my family to Palmerston North, New Zealand, where I had found a job at the local newspaper. James went on to teaching jobs in England, America and again in Japan, before eventually settling in Andorra.

For years, I wrote little or nothing, apart from submissions to local and national authorities in connection with the various campaigns I was involved in. One of these was to preserve a local park, on which the authorities proposed to place a custodial institution; another was to secure the worker's right to a smoke-free workplace. Then my daughter developed schizophrenia, and I had to drop everything to pursue her as her demons drove her to Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington, and eventually Dunedin — where I got her into hospital.

Although James and I exchanged a few letters and cards, the correspondence gradually came to an end. For more than 20 years, we did not hear from each other. But as my daughter recovered from her psychosis, and as semi-retirement brought me more time, I started to write poems again. I thought that some of them were as good as, and possibly better than, anything I had written during those early, creative days in Japan. And that thought brought James to mind. Perhaps he would like them, too.