The alarm goes at 6.30. I’m already up, feeling good about having stolen a march on my life. I have a bath and wash my hair listening to Radio 4.

I wear Gap clothes and also have a couple of smartish jackets and dark trousers. For anything swanky I go to Margaret Howell. Breakfast is Weetabix, with caffeine-free mint tea and The Guardian.

I write between 7 and 9. I use an HB pencil for poetry, a nice, soft pencil that I have to keep sharpening. Each time I do, it is like rebooting my brain. I write prose with a Tombow pen, using black ink. My notebooks are Ordning & Reda from Selfridges — blank pages for poetry, lined for prose. I try to write poems every day.

When I was 17 my mother had a riding accident. For nine years until she died, she was in and out of a coma. That experience dented my helmet at a crucial time. I probably wouldn’t have had this creative interior world without it. It’s made me not quite trusting, and taught me a big lesson about life’s random cruelties. She was a sweet and good person. I miss her. Writing is a way of balancing the scales and giving something back.

At 9 the phone starts ringing. I teach creative writing on the MA course at Royal Holloway. There’s a lot of stuff to read and mark for students. They mostly want to be writers, but not in a berserk Booker-prize way. Some are very successful. Tahmima Anam, who wrote A Golden Age, is rather a star. Applicants to the course talk about their fear of the blank sheet of paper. Well, if they’re that frightened, they shouldn’t give up the day job. One of my favourite sights is a blank piece of paper. The problem is finding time to deface it in some way with words.

I’m slightly unusual in liking a variety of other stuff in my life. I’ve always believed in the value of reading aloud. I’d like to read more books on tape. And I wouldn’t mind doing voice-overs. I’m also involved in an exciting project on climate change with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, master of the Queen’s music. He’s also setting to music the poem I wrote about Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier who fought in the first-world-war trenches. He’s 110.

I go to meetings on the Tube or the 29 bus. We gave up having a car, mostly for green reasons — and the expense. But at the weekends, for visiting galleries and food-shopping in Islington, I long for a little something on wheels with a motor. During the week I shop at Sainsbury’s. But lunch is usually a sandwich at a desk.

I’m chair of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. The National Archives in Kew have a special sense of animation because of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, which has done a huge amount to help people understand what an archive is. I set up the Poetry Archive with Richard Carrington, and we’re amazed by the audience figures, especially as the received wisdom is that reading poetry has gone the way of clog-dancing. It’s not true: 125,000 people use the site each month. I’m a member of the Advertising Standards Authority Council too. Apart from the serial complainers and the moral thought police, we’re living in a culture in which there is heightened likelihood of religious people wanting to register their offendedness.

As poet laureate, my life is basically very ordinary, but with a lot of spectacular business travelling, visiting schools and attending events where I’m usually the event. An American paper described the post as a double-edged chalice. Writing to commission is hard for a lyric poet, and there are pressures surrounding royal events, but it’s an opportunity to do something for poetry and get people to listen to you. To whoever is appointed when I step down next May, I caution that the job comes with a health warning. A lot of the time, your life is not really your own. You have to get used to the fact that somebody else with your name is appearing in the paper, reporting things you’ve said in places you’ve never been.

The royal family don’t give approval of a poem. Once a year I go with the winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry to present him or her to the Queen. We spend half an hour chatting to her. She’s always very engaged with the winner. I’m full of admiration. She shakes hands with thousands of people, managing to be friendly, interested and yet preserving something of herself. As poet laureate, I meet a lot of people. It’s exhausting and sometimes makes me feel and look like a bit of soap at the end of its life.

Evenings in, spent with a frying pan cooking dinner, are precious. We’ll talk about the day and watch Channel 4 news, then Newsnight. In between, I’ll read. I’ve read 19 books of poetry for the T S Eliot prize and am also reading for the Cohen prize, awarded every two years. I’ve just finished Richard Holmes’s brilliant The Age of Wonder. I have different reading speeds. Committee papers are top-speed; MLA and Poetry Archive material needs to be slower. Novels are medium-speed and poems are extremely slow — like the old 78 records.

I’m rarely in bed before midnight, and so tired I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. I enjoy being asleep. What happens in my dream life affects me during the day. I’m either deeply troubled and jumpy or feel enabled, as if I’ve understood something.

Andrew Motion’s latest book, Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets, is published by Faber

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