Don’t tell anyone, but I get very, very nervous about delivering workshops to school children. Who knows what they might do?! Unripe humans! But it was my sacred duty as poet-in-residence at the Hartlepool WW1 archive project to spend a morning on a boat, sorry ship, on a ship, with 25 Year Five children, on a ship, writing about the ship that we were on. This ship.

Luckily, mostly what these unripe humans did was to get very excited by the joys of writing poetry, especially when they find out they have the powers of Amazing Adjectives and Super Similes! (Favourite extended simile of the day – “as red as a devil, sitting on lava, eating a bloody heart, in an Arsenal strip”)

We collectively made a poem describing the ship by describing its many parts, textures, surfaces. It worked. I smoothed out the edges. It’s now online on the archive website here – give it a read? You can find some more of mine up there too.