This is my designated annual study week.  That is of itself something of a joke since I already have a service to lead on Thursday (Ascension for anyone who is ignorant of these things, like most of my Deacons, despite it being in the church notices countless times) have yet another mega-pastoral crisis emerging and yesterday had to attend two urgent meetings at very short notice - one with our architect and another with school governors.  In a moment of total insanity I agreed to attend the Cambridge DPT presentation of literature reviews -partly because I thought it would be interesting and partly because I thought I might learn something - I now have three 8k papers to read before tomorrow!  The only consolation is that having glanced through them, the standard of writing seems no better than mine!

I am meant to be writing a 12k essay (Manchester requirements are different) on my literature review.  Yesterday I wrote about 4k words and then, reading over them and marking up changes, virutally rewrote the whole lot.  It reminded me of my early and late days in industry.  In the early days I'd write a report and my supervisor would virtually rewrite it, towards the end other people would write reports and I'd do the same for them.  Now I find I am in both places at once - the novice writing the essays and the experienced reoprt writer editing the clumsy prose.

Today I need to get an advert to the local press for our Pentecost events, deliver batches leaflets to be delivered house to house, write another 8k words (no chance) and all before I leave for GB at 5:30.  Hmm.  Working for a living was so much easier.  Blogging as a displacement technique perhaps...

UPDATED!

Then my computer ate my essay, I mean really ate it, gone, phut, one moment I was saving it (something I tend to do every couple of paragraphs!), next it did not exist.  So much for perseverence of the saints, or some such computer equivalent.  After messing about I managed to descend into the hell of files with weird names and find a temporary fastsave version (phew) only five minutes older than the work I'd done, and now I have about three versions on different storage media - and a new hard copy.  Oh yes, and for half a day's work I now have a tidied up 4k words and nothing new added.  Grr!  Moral of the story - bring back pens and paper.