Using only my increasingly patchy memory and a slightly tattered 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' calendar, I'm going to try and sum up 2007.

The year began for me in early January, a month in which I was unaccountably gloomier than a soot-filled air-raid shelter in a blackout. Could this have been linked to Slovenia replacing its noble tolar with the euro? Possibly, as most of my investments are pegged to the tolar. Looking back, I see that on January 2nd I had an appointment with "Nurse at 10". I don't remember what that was all about, but I trust it has cleared up by now. It seems I also went for several runs of around 32 minutes each, so clearly I tore my achilles tendon later in the year [watch the self-pity-Ed]. The calendar showed Buffy holding that weird 'uber-axe' thing from Season 7 while Giles looked a little shifty behind her.

February followed hard on the heels of January, as is its wont. I had coffee in Russell Square with the talented and erudite Phil Fried of The Manhattan Review. I watched 'Old Joy', 'Climates' and 'Hot Fuzz' at the cinema and even though it was the first two of these films which were ponderous, light on narrative and long on long-takes, it was 'Hot Fuzz' that I mainly snoozed through. Scorsese finally won the Oscar he should have picked up for 'Taxi Driver', 'Raging Bull' and 'Goodfellas'. At least they didn't give it to him for 'Gangs of New York'. It was Spike's turn on the Buffy calendar and you could have sliced prosciutto on his cheekbones.

March is meant to come in like a lion and leave like a lamb but this year it came in like a marmoset and left like a tapir, which was a relief. I saw some dance with Miss Julie at the Royal Ballet and also attended a TV Drama writing course, which was fairly gruelling. Needless to say, I have neither written nor pitched any new TV series this year. This month saw the first of 2007's many visits to The Ivy for The Good Doctor Luckhurst's birthday bash. The zinfandel and peanut butter ice-cream were highlights for me. As was Fern Britton. It seems very 'ITV', The Ivy, if you know what I mean: post-GMTV for a boozy lunch. An Iranian gunboat scooped up the Royal Navy's finest like it was spooning matzo balls out of chicken soup. Calendar-wise, Riley was looking duller than ever in a green cable-knit sweater and a slightly furrowed brow.

In April I went to Trieste for a week to dine on goulash, tagliatelle, and on tagliatelle-with-goulash. It was on this trip, running past busts of Joyce and Svevo in the Giardino Pubblico, that I injured my achilles and haven't been able to run since. Being unable to run and becoming a goulash enthusiast is a disastrous combination. Francis came out for a weekend and I took him to the stunning Grotta Gigante and also to some of my favourite goulash restaurants. 'Gliese 581 c', a potentially habitable planet, was found in the constellation of Libra. I have a feeling we'll end up there one day, although Cassiopeia is meant to have better schools. On the calendar, Giles outdid Keira Knightley on the pouting front.

May brought a splendid poetry reading at Clare Hall, Cambridge along with Isobel Dixon, Luke Heeley, Liane Strauss and Roisin Tierney. We tried to recreate the feeding of the 5000 with a lamb bhuna and a dhal but didn't quite make it. Lunchtime Bloody Marys went down very well the next day, however. 'Went for swim' starts to appear on the calendar in place of 'Went for run'. I like swimming but it just doesn't seem to burn as many calories (or tear as many ligaments) as running and I can never, ever, shake the rubber shark out of 'Jaws' from my mind. I attended Cicely and Amit's splendid wedding in Rugby: well worth the 14 hours it took to get there and back on Britain's knackered weekend rail system. Dawny simpered annoyingly on the calendar.

Miss Julie ran her first 5K in June and I went to The Ivy again. The highlight this time was probably Piers Morgan guffawing at the next table. I can't remember what I ate but it was pretty good. I don't think it was the 2100-year old melon that was found in Japan this month. They're still looking for a 2000-year old parma ham to go with it as a nice starter. I attended an excellent Poet in the City reading (one of several this year in fact) in the Lloyds Building, to see Matthew Hollis and Patience Agbabi. Xander wore brown cable-knit on the calendar (my Italian tutor Rita once saw his photo and exclaimed, "Chi è questo ragazzo bello?").

July brought a trip to Glasgow and Aberdeen to see friends and family. Virgin First Class to Glasgow was surprisingly comfortable and plentiful, with hot breakfast, hot afternoon snacks and lots of tea, water and wine. I recommend it. I started a new Italian course and saw Beethoven's 7th at The Proms (this may have also involved a sublime apricot tart at 'Hugo's' on Exhibition Road). I became involved in the BFI's 'O Dreamland' project and started watching dozens of fantastic films in their wonderful Mediatheque. I also read at the Poetry Society a couple of times and became acquainted with the very talented Heather Phillipson. On the calendar, the poor old Buffybot lost her head (Season Five if you recall).

August brought Mahler's 9th, the re-release of 'Raging Bull' and a great reading from Luke Kennard at Salt Margins (Whitechapel Gallery). I also visited the zoo with my niece Lindsay and fell in love with the Red River Hogs and their piglets that resembled furry little Everton Mints. Putin resumed nuclear bomber flights in strategic areas and a US plane flew around the States with a payload full of live nuclear warheads. Who is it we're supposed to be worried about again? Few mentions of swimming but several of 'Physio'. Angel popped back for a bit of lurking and brooding on the calendar. For an immortal, immutable being, he's definitely aged and put on a few pounds.

September (why are there so many months in a year?) heralded a temporary obsession with my blood pressure and a surge in Shakespearean studies. I read several plays while walking up and down The Thames and watched 'Richards 2 and 3', 'Macbeth', 'Antony and Cleo', 'Coriolanus' and 'As You Like It' on DVD. Shakespearean tropes and diction began to creep into my own writing [watch that-Ed]. I went to Trieste again for more goulash and to proofread our new pamphlet, Ask for It by Name on the train from Trieste to Venice. The Rugby World Cup started in France. Australia and France were both beaten: that never gets old (unlike Anya who dominates September on the calendar).

In October I read with about nine others as part of the BFI's 'O Dreamland' event and had a splendid time. I also saw Naomi Watts in conversation, which left me more than a little star-struck. In a state of lassitude, I went to see Mark Kozelek play at the Shepherd's Bush Empire but he was so good that my faith was restored and I vowed to always see my heroes when given the chance. The marvellous art, fashion, photography and literature magazine Stimulus Respond was launched in print. Marion Jones surrendered her five Olympic Gold medals; I had daydreams of Sir Steve Redgrave doing the same but then the 2012 logo popped into my head and I had to retire with a migraine. Willow rather fetching, if garishly-dressed, on the old calendar.

November saw my birthday and the traditional week-long celebrations I devise and then become too anxious to fully enjoy (although splendid times were had). I saw Mahler 5, Patrick Stewart's 'Macbeth' (sans Patrick Stewart) and The Good Doctor interviewing Patrick Keiller at the BFI. I made and cancelled an appointment with Kitchens Direct. My kitchen continues to fill me with dread and I wonder if I'll ever get it fixed up properly. Food programmes have given me profound kitchen-envy which I am powerless to act upon, dispell or overcome. The UK government lost yet more secure personal data while Tara sported a dreadful, sparkly, wolf-themed top on the calendar.

December saw the production of this unhelpful round-up of the year's events and a whole bunch of parties and Christmas poetry bashes, including Roddy's epic '12 Days of Christmas' bash, which I've covered elsewhere. I dredged myself in DVD box sets of 'The World at War', 'Angel', 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' and 'Berlin Alexanderplatz'. My forthcoming book got a nice little mention in The Guardian and I look forward to 2008 with more hope and enthusiasm than last year. No air-raid shelters for me this January, I hope. Warm wishes to all from me and the entire cast of Buffy who have gathered together for the December picture.

With thanks to Gina Stokes for the calendar. 

Christmas gift vouchers have enabled me to buy back a huge chunk of my childhood in the form of Thames Television's magisterial 32-hour documentary series about World War 2, 'The World at War'. Neal Ascherson, Jeremy Isaacs, Laurence Olivier (to highlight just three from a group of around 50 who toiled from '71 to '74): what a team and what an incredible achievement this was and remains.

This series, first aired in 1974, became a focal point for my eight-year old self, my slightly older sister and my parents, and has haunted me ever since. Carl Davis's surging theme music set to the pale, sad, suffering photographs of nameless souls consumed by insistent flames still stops me dead in my tracks. It's a brilliant rendition of Heine's prescient words from 1821: "Where they burn books, they will also burn people."

It may be that innocence is lost with the first breath we draw, but for me this series tore the lid off the world to reveal the infinite capacity of humanity to suffer and inflict suffering. Yet this recent history into the middle of which my parents were pitched sometimes felt like a dark and vicious science fiction tale. Those events can look like feverish projections of imagined cruelty too extreme to be unleashed.

But then there are the colour home-movies of Eva Braun picking flowers; of the Führer patting dogs and crouching to kiss babies; cinema newsreels fomenting and exaggerating grievances in the Sudetenland and the Polish Corridor; a national campaign across Germany to reacquaint a wary nervous German people with the props, the trappings, the look-and-feel of 'the necessary war'. You might need 'guns not butter' to become powerful rather than merely fat but you certainly need to butter people up for war. We're still slick with it.

And what a cast! Visit imdb.com for a bizarre roll-call of contributors including Anthony Eden, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Oppenheimer, Bing Crosby, Albert Speer, Jo Stalin and Jimmy Cagney. 

Watching it this morning I also realised that, years before I visited London, the Thames Television logo was my first memorable glimpse of St. Paul's Cathedral: a building that went on to become a minor obsession of mine (see Converting St. Paul's).

For years, I must have thought that Tower Bridge abutted directly onto St. Paul's, which was only two steps away from The Houses of Parliament. A bit like a military map of all the juiciest targets. St. Paul's, of course, remained eerily unscathed during the Blitz.

It's a bargain on Amazon at the moment by the way: somewhere in the neighbourhood of £35, which is a very nice neighbourhood indeed.

Click to zoomifyUsually, the views from 'Tuscan Towers' are commanding and inspiring: swinging around from Tower Bridge to Alexandra Palace.

But today, due to this stifling, flight-choking fog, visibility is down to almost nothing. I'm a little surprised as yesterday evening the view looked like this.

I hope it lifts soon, so that my furthest-flung friends can fly home in time for Christmas and so that I can at least see the lines in the road on my little trips over the next few days.

The 36-poet '12 Days of Christmas' bash I mentioned the other day was a splendid affair: three chunks of 12 poems delivered with gusto and at the correct pace (no 'long-readers' at this one); a tackily spangly little stage for us all to declaim from; and a small but perfectly formed bar on hand to sup from between the snappy 25-minute sets.

There were too many poems and readers for me to do justice to here, and anyway I was experiencing the classic states of mind when reading in public.

Waiting to read: is the intro okay? Maybe I should drop that gag? No, extend it. No, use that one that worked last time... ah, someone's just made a similar crack so okay, let's be serious for once, where's the harm in that? Can't I be serious once in a while? How come other people get to be serious? I don't see why I shouldn't be serious just once. I could just launch into the poem. But shouldn't I explain that weird term in the second line? But if I do, those in the know will think I'm a patronising oaf. Ah nuts, where are we now? Who's on? Ooh, I like that dress. Actually, where is my poem? Ah, it's okay, it's in my pocket. But is this the good version? Didn't I change a line on another copy? Never mind, if it comes to that I'll change the line on the spot. No, you can't do that you fool, you'll screw it up! Ooh, that was a good line, who is that? I've never seen them before. Okay, only two readers to go now before I'm on. Blimey that was a short one. Ah, I recognise him. Yeah, this one is good; I tried something similar but couldn't quite get it to work. Maybe I'll have another crack at it. Yeah, that's my favourite one so far. So, who's next? Where are we up to? Why's everybody staring at me? Are we finished? Where's the next reader?

Having read: I knew I shouldn't have changed that line on the spot! It threw the whole scansion out by a beat. Is it me, or were they clapping louder before? No, that's a good-sized clap. Perfectly respectable. If we had a clap-o-meter here I don't think I need worry too much about my score. I think the intro worked. I heard a laugh, a palpable laugh. Maybe a few. That's all I really want if I admit it: laughs. No it's not, don't be an idiot, you're just being hard on yourself. Laughs are good but best when immediately crushed by a serious poem. Maybe. Okay, where's my seat? Someone's taken my seat. And my drink. Who's on now? Would it be rude to get up and go to the bar while they're reading? I mean, I deserve a little treat and this adrenaline will keep me up till 3 if I don't self-medicate. How come the adrenaline is the same for a two-minute poem as it is for a 40-minute reading? Do you think I should put this new poem on my website or is that too 'poety'? Lord knows it's hard enough finding new content. Maybe I should put it up? No, don't do that you idiot. Okay.

Bad Quarto

It seems my Folio’s out of joint
with the version that you scribbled down
while sub-plots drew the spot from kings
and courtiers waltzed on from the wings
or were bottled off by groundlings.

My favourite scene? The woodland spree
when, sappily, I carved your name
into the bark of every tree
and vowed I’d never love again
if love were sundered by Act III.

But in the Quarto that you stage
you leave the bloody business on the page:
of how I called the surgeons round
to hack the lumber to the ground,
revealing five pale rings per trunk,
scorching the salted earth’s black stumps.

By the way, if anyone else who read on the night reads this and wants me to post their poem, please contact me. 

Here is my Christmas Card to anyone who happens to drop by. This is an object lesson in how to disguise those unsightly building projects you may have started before Christmas but have no intention of finishing until well into the New Year. Thanks to contractors at the Royal Festival Hall for showing how industrial plant and machinery can be magical, given the right make-over.