Poet Ian McMillan talks about how he thanked the people of Nottingham for Covid-19 research

The researchers at Nottingham University Hospitals couldn't do what they do without the thousands of other people who sometimes don't get the credit they're due. Most drug treatments start off in the laboratory but before they're allowed to be used by the NHS, they're trialled in the wild - that is on real patients in real life. And like everything over the last year with Covid 19 that's happened at a faster, bigger scale than ever before. In Nottingham alone, more than ten thousand people have signed up to be part of our work on trials including the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine and dexamethasone, amongst others. We wanted to say thank you to those people for their help so we commissioned Yorkshire poet Ian McMillan to write a thank you on our behalf. I talked to him about how he wrote the poem, why he likes the shape of numbers even though they make him nervous, and how words and numbers should get together for a picnic - a socially distanced one of course.