Shackleton School, Ashby, Massachusetts, U.S.A

I have a paper to write and it is raining, dark gashes of water superimposed upon the windowpane above my head. Apart from this window, with its Germanic view of brown treetops and grey skies my view is restricted by wooden partitions, my horizons shrunk to a half eaten apple core, my computer and assortments of various rubbish

“I have a paper to write” Sitting here, longing to be a Mozart of writing, I resemble more of the mad scientist, bent as I am into my workstation, hair askew with rock music blasting around me. People stream past and deep in thought I hardly notice them, fingers forming a staccato beat upon the keyboard. I want to write, to capture and release, transport the reader with every word, transform my page into an ocean, a council flat, a jungle. Instead I am forced to write, to talk about serious matters,

I Wake up; slide from the bunk and onto a floor littered with refuge, realizing all the time that I have a paper to write. Get some trousers and a tee shirt, don’t even bother to slide shoes on properly, as lurching forward I burst out of the door and into the rain. “I have a paper to write” a dull mantra repeating inside my head, following the beat of my jaw, as chewing away on a slice of buttered toast I try desperately to work out the way my individual limbs should be working this early in the morning.

I have a paper to write and yet I am not grabbed, no not want to be, by figures and facts, the staples of a good research paper. How can I even try to express love, anxiety, fear of boarding school and the romance of a Khmer temple in such a paper. Can I? Could I at once shed light on mental issues in Iraq and still present it like a story.

I can try to use words that enchant, that tell the facts without embellishment but still make it feel like you are there, standing in a hospital ward, rubbing off sweat with one hand and calming patients with the other. And in the end is that not what my blog is, real life told as if in a story, descriptions of things that matter, that I care about?