Anyway, if you want a relaxed, fun and interesting reminder of Christmas morning, here’s the iplayer link for my Radio Scotland appearance. There are four days left to listen before it turns into a virtual pumpkin. I pitch up at about 12:15 into the proceedings and again at 39:43, but if you fast forward, you’ll miss some great music and interviews.

*The irony of celebrating the birth of the rabbi of a first-century Jewish sect by eating pork is not lost on me.

The show — “A fabulously festive celebration of music and conversation” — starts at 7:05 am. This may seem an unearthly hour to anyone without young children, but I fully expect to have been up for a good while by then, having spent the previous night in a frenzy of wrapping until heaven knows when. Still, if you miss it live — and I wish you the rest that allows that — or are not able to receive Radio Scotland, I imagine you’ll be able to catch up at the link above or through the estimible iplayer.

I’m on twice in the first hour of the programme, chatting with Cathy and Ricky — yes, it is Ricky Ross of of Deacon Blue — and reading some poems. None of the poems are directly Christmas pieces, but the first set very much concerns love and family, and so is quite appropriate for the time of year. It includes some poems from the “10 x 10″ sequence published in The Best British Poetry 2011. The poem I read on my second appearance is “Tae a Lousy Piper”!

You needn’t fear for the sanctity of my Christmas morning: it may go out as if live, but it’s all pre-recorded.  In fact, I took an extended lunchtime to do the recording on Wednesday just past and had a fantastic time.

I hope you enjoy the show. I think you will. There’s some great music on it, including live music from the CoroEdina chamber choir. And the other guest I heard recording — Sang Y. Cha, formerly an agent, I think, in Hollywood and now minister of  St Mungo’s Parish Church in Alloa — was certainly intriguing listening.

Those lovely people at Silk Road Review have nominated me for a Pushcart Prize. They chose my poem “Nocturne to 60 in 10 Seconds”, from vol 6.2 of SRR as one of their six nominations for this year’s Pushcarts. They nominated only two poems, the other one being “Where” by Loretta Obstfeld from the same issue. You can read her poem here, but you’ll have to buy the magazine to read mine.

This is rather old news, really, give that I heard at the start of the month. But it’s nonetheless still news worth sharing. The Pushcarts are an annual prize that celebrate work that has appeared in little magazines and small press publications in America. There’s an anthology of the winners each year.

If I was in the US, I’d probably know very well what the timescale was for announcing the winners. As far as I can tell, it seems like that happens around March and the anthology is out in the autumn. (I’m sure my American readers will correct me if I’ve picked that up wrongly.) Given that timescale, I can’t do much other than hold it lightly!

The prose also looks well worth a read, as ever. There’s a piece by Kathryn Simmonds on titling poems; Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks chooses a section from Auden’s “In Memory of WB Yeats”; Sally Read writes about the profane and the sacred in poetry; and, finally, Maritreyabandhu provides a Buddhist approach to “Making poetry a spiritual practice”. That last one in particular sounds interesting.

Magma is an excellent magazine, with a rotating editorship, which keeps it fresh. Rob is editing issue 53— entitled Music: The Universal Language — along with Kona Macphee. The call for submissions is here.

It was a real pleasure to meet Colin and Adrian from Gutter magazine. Not only have they managed to plug a yawning gap in the world of Scottish literary magazines with a most stylishly produced publication packed with interesting work from new and more established writers, but they’re both just really great guys.

“A Night in the Gutter” was huge fun (though it had some moments I won’t go into). The real revelation for me was the first reader, Frances Corr, who read from a story that was published in Gutter 4. I tell you, folks, she is a writer to watch. Her distinctive use of language betokens an individual cast of mind. “A Fairy Story” is funny, poignant, intelligent and sparky. A fine mix of smeddum and tenderness, English and Scots.

I was also really impressed with Rodge Glass’s reading. Rodge read from an excerpt from his next novel that’s in the current issue of Gutter. If I said that it has a football — specifically, Man United — setting, I know that would be a turn-off for many and pique the interest of others. Personally, I’d be closer to the turn-off end, but Rodge’s piece is an absorbing, fluid, convincing description and exploration of the ambition and devotion of the young, professional footballer. In the way that it draws out those universal human emotions that are so central to the sport, it reminds me of Matthew Fitt’s remarkable Scots poem “Jim Leighton”, about the eponymous goalie. Rodge should count that as high praise!

A very honourable mention should certainly go to the evening’s band, The Maple Leaves. I thoroughly enjoyed their well-written songs and tight vocal harmonies.

My set went well. I was the only one not to use the mike, following Kristin Linklater’s advice. Although I didn’t really get a chance to try out the acoustic properly before we started, when I got up on the stage, I felt it was pretty good for the voice. Some of the feedback that I got from audience members over the weekend seemed to back that up.

It’s quite liberating to feel that you don’t have to use the mike in a large hall like the one we were in. In fact, it now feels quite necessary not to use the mike from my opening poem, “Pedestrian”. If you’ve seen me speak it, you’ll understand why.

Here’s my whole set:

• Pedestrian
• Origami
• Fallen Icons of the Angel Barbie
• Coming Third
• Tae a Lousy Piper
• Not Being the Woodsman of Oz

(“Origami”,  “Coming Third” and “Not Being the Woodsman of Oz” are all from my sequence “10 x 10”, which was published in Gutter 4 and has just been republished in The Best British Poetry 2011.)

I won’t put you to sleep by going into everything else that happened over the weekend, but I will leave you with a couple more of my highlights, invidious as that is. First of all, I am simply deeply thankful that I got the chance to meet Chris Agee, editor of Irish Pages and the author of the remarkable poetry collection Next to Nothing. I’ve mentioned that book here before. It’s a profoundly moving, and simply profound, gathering of poems about the death of his daughter, Miriam. I’ve been keen to meet Chris since I read the book. Suffice it to say, although we had only a brief chance to chat, the connection is — for obvious reasons — strong.

The other highlight I’ll mention was hearing Angus Peter Campbell read from his new collection, Aibisidh (that is, ABC). It wasn’t only the quality of the poetry that made it a standout event, but the fact that some of Aoghnas Phàdraig’s thinking aloud in answer to the questions he was asked opened up for me a little more some of the things that have been going on in my own recent writing. This isn’t the time to go into what that is, but I think it may have given me the opening I need to take it further.

It’s a well produced magazine, full of completely unfamiliar names to me, although there are one or two that I recognise from Facebook. Robert took two poems of mine: “Nocturne to 60 in 10 Seconds” and “MacAdam Takes to the Sea”. (The latter, of course, is also a filmpoem by Alistair Cook, which you can see here, and which Robert kindly mentioned in this recent blog post, but this is the first time the text has appeared in print.)

I had a read through all the poems in Saturday’s warm sun — my apologies to the short story writers in the magazine! So far my favourites are Dawn Manning’s “White Rabbit” and the translation of Ahmed Uysal’s “Broken Triplets” by Nesrin Eruysal and Ken Fifer for the strength of their lyricism.

Much of the poetry in the publication is in the mainstream anecdotal mode, but Dawn Manning’s has a music that lifts it above the bulk of similar pieces of writing. I would definitely be interested to see more of her work.

Those certainly aren’t the only poems I enjoyed and, of course, others may grow on me more if I reread them. There is quite an impressive sweep of geographical settings for the poems, and it will be interesting to see how they interact with the short stories when I get round to reading those.

Now, away sit yourself down at this particular literary crossroads.