One of the reasons I feel compelled to write poetry, or at least try, is to preserve and celebrate some of the small sights and incidents of daily life that would otherwise be forgotten. 

Walking home from my girlfriend’s place this morning, I passed a block of flats and noticed a large, round pink thing, wedged into a space between the bins, an outhouse and some concrete steps. Amongst the grey brick of the surrounding buildings and raincloud heavy sky above, it jarred. 

I quickly realised this alien object was an umbrella, abandoned, but opened there, like a gigantic flowerhead, a strange triffid, lurking at the edge of the estate. I haven’t yet written a poem about it, but that’s the kind of little thing I’m talking about here. 

Insignificant in the wider scheme of things, easily forgotten, but to me, worth marking. A point of interest, an off-key visual note, strange and beautiful even, amongst the daily grind of work, or looking for it, of chores and news of wars, politics and the twists and turns of our fragile economy.

Little things that don’t really matter, which is exactly why they do. 

Another small thing that I feel like celebrating lately is a gate. An iron, metal gate, painted green, at one end of what for a long time has been a dead end side street. For years, certainly since I’ve lived in the area, West Norwood Cemetery had one entrance, the main one on Norwood Road. 

If you wanted to visit, to look around, you had to enter and exit there. This meant the cemetery required a dedicated trip. Had to be the destination. You’d arrive, wander around a bit, then leave. 

The new gate changes all this. Now, there is a new green way to cut across from where I live, down to the high street and the shops. I used to have a choice of two longer ways around, down a road called Auckland Hill – or Awkward Hill as I call it, or an even longer route through backstreets in West Dulwich and West Norwood. 

Now, most days I walk through the cemetery. It’s almost like having a new park on my doorstep. And judging by the parents pushing prams, joggers, shoppers and amblers passing through, I’m not alone in enjoying it. 

A pedestrian gate, allowing a green short-cut to the shops, via a Victorian Cemetery isn’t going to land me a freelance gig, or a full time job, or fix the door that sticks at home, or sort the dodgy shower plumbing, but it’s a little daily joy. I see far more jays than on the streets, flitting between stands of trees, perhaps retrieving or looking for lost acorns. 

Magpies gather all over. Always make me laugh when they make their rattling calls near Hiram Maxim’s grave – as if they know the inventor of the machine gun is down there.

Crows are everywhere in here, of course. Cawing like mardy old folks, strutting about, or hoping onto tombs, as if inviting the snapping of cliched photos. Often you’ll spy glossy, healthy looking foxes, who’ll turn their heads suspiciously then hurry off into the shrubs. Parakeets shriek and bicker. Woodpeckers drum at old oaks. Recently, I glimpsed a small head, poking tentatively out from a drain – a rat, sizing up its next foray into the world outside the sewers. And also, somewhere underneath the cemetery, bound now into the drainage system, the Effra, running through on its way to Brixton.

For a place of the dead, there’s a lot of living going on. And keeping an eye on all below – especially the pigeons, perhaps the songbirds too – occasionally a sparrowhawk scans the place from overhead.

As well as urban wildlife, I like having the chance to note more of the headstones, tombs and monuments in the cemetery, reflecting on all those past lives. There’s even a well-worn path, off the main ones, through I use with my two sons, when heading off to buy bread and other supplies – The Ship Path – which always provokes a jokey ‘It’s not that bad Daddy’ from my younger companions. 

So, here’s to small things, little changes, welcome short-cuts, new gates. Individually they don’t mean all that much, but add up to something greater – a few more reasons to make getting up and out of bed in the morning a slightly more enticing prospect.