It’s interesting to rummage around in old folders and notebooks, looking for something useful that might be worth sending somewhere, I found myself rolling the years back – at least ten years, discovering (it felt like that) poems which were remembered and recognised, but also discovering that they’d changed. Or more accurately, I’d changed. It was still me who wrote them, and they were still them, but we were both different. I felt as though I was travelling upstream on a voyage of discovery – discovery not just of old poems, but of my earlier self. Here I was – or am – going back in time, when things were younger: striding against the flow of time, through years that had past. One poem in particular gave me a metaphor. I could see why I’d titled the poem ‘The Explorer.’ There’s something naturally attractive about the source of a river, as the great Victorian explorers discovered (you just have to use that word). And the poem brought back that feeling of