Anything but the essay!

My displacement syndrome has driven me to write a poem rather than complete the first part of the three essays that I have to write before Thursday. Amazingly enough it is a poem about swimming. Well, sort of. It certainly starts with my irritation about a young swimmer who was substantially faster than I and sort of turns into a musing about all things transitory. Or very few things transitory as I restricted the poem to a sonnet's length – even if I didn't follow any of any of the sonnet rules apart form the line numbers. Anyway, it is on my poetry blog at stephen m rees new poems or possibly its all one word, but in some combination of my name and new poems you will find any new poetic writing which I have been shameless enough to post.

The OU essay writing is going amazingly slowly and, given the number of days left before I have to hand in three academically respectable pieces of work on the Renaissance, it is going to have to speed up in fairly short order. I always tell myself that I work better under pressure – though my only real concession to that is cancelling my attendance at the Wednesday meeting of the Poetry Group in Barcelona. And that is the day before I have to hand the bloody things in. Which doesnt say a great deal about how I feel my planning is about to go! Never mind, I can always settle my nerves by telling myself that anything is better than nothing. Not quite the standard that I was aiming for, but let's be real about this!

You may have noticed that there has been a variety of fonts and styles in the presentation of the blog. This is because I have changed my computer (or one of them at least) and, under strict instructions from Toni I am only using free-source programs, so this page has been created in LibreOffice Writer – and it does not seem to interact exactly in the same way as Word. The fault is probably mine: the User is always wrong! And I am working to try and find a way that the program will start behaving in a way that I want it to, rather than doing what the hell it want to in spite of what I try. It is an education. Of sorts.

And this is the first of my experiments.