This week I've been mostly.... driving around the country and writing poetry from various hotel rooms, in the car or at a salon as they try to rectify a disastrous home dye jobby.

This was my first experience of being a students rep for the South West UK region - yes, a pretty large region to cover - at the senate and I wanted to ensure all went smoothly so I did a dry run last Sunday and tested a free to  download sat nav for my iPad. The latter was a disaster as it told me to take the fifth exit from roundabouts with only two exits and so on. However, my fantastic partner wrote out all instructions, I supplemented them with a different download and all went well - even though I ignored some written instructions preferring to keep my eyes on the road instead.

So here are two of the many haikus created on my journeys to Milton Keynes and Gloucestershire. The first was inspired by my breakfast scene from the somewhat grubby window at the Premier Inn (yes, really!) and the other was dreamt up while walking to the hair salon in Cheltenham. Did I tell you that a flood in the house had caused me to leave a hair dye on my head for too long resulting in a strip of black roots and a Cruella De Ville hairstyle? No? Surely an oversight on my part. Anyway, it now looks less Cruella or Bride of Frankenstein so I shan't be walking around scaring young children.

Mists rise with the sun.
Swans converge, above, below.
Ripples fill the lake.

Colours explode on

Pine scented walks, muffle steps

With fallen beauty.

and because there has been a lot of talk about copyright issues I now have the heeby-jeebies about not putting a copyright message on everything despite questioning who would want to nick my stuff anyway. So this morning I have found out that holding down the Option / Alt key and pressing 'G' creates a © for me. I shall share this knowledge on the A215 forum as it seems like a sensible thing to share amongst fellow writers.

© Karen Downs-Barton