Sitting staring at a blank screen, her fingers trailing lightly over the computer keyboard, she struggled to come up with an idea for a story for the writers group that she attended. Even with all this modern technology at her disposal, still the ideas flowed like cold treacle in Iceland.

She set her mind to wandering, just in case it happened upon a stray thought hovering around waiting for some fertile mind to adopt it. Her mind came back a few minutes later, empty handed, apart from having discovered how cold her feet were. Switching on her heater, she gazed vacantly around her, in case her eyes had better luck than her mind.

"I should give this place a good tidying up," she mused. "It looks like every writer since Shakespeare has run amok in here. Half those books can go; I'll never read them again.

"The clock needs a new battery, those rechargeable batteries don't hold a charge worth a damn. The desk lamp needs a new globe. Why do I need all those lever arch files? Eleven pens and nineteen pencils, not bad for somebody who pounds a keyboard! I should treat my wheelie bin to a good feed!"

Dragging her eyes back to the blank screen, she sighed, and typed out a few words at random, in the hope that one would strike a note.

Still no luck, unless she wanted to write a story on office clutter. Well, Shakespeare never wrote on that subject, so why should she? Maybe if she stared at an infinite number of computer screens for an infinite number of days, she could write a sequel to Hamlet.

Did this ever happen to Shakespeare with his quill pen and parchment? Did this ever happen to the early cave dwellers, with a sharp stone and a barren cave wall crying out for decoration?

She felt a familiar "why me?" coming on, and ransacked her memory for some recent gossip or event in her circle that could serve as the basis for a rollicking tale. Nothing, except that Mike had grown a beard, and nobody had the nerve to tell him that it made him look like Bob Hoskins.

Bloody hell! If that was the highlight of her social life, she was in big trouble. Time to scrap the homework, and go out looking for some real social life!

She typed the heading: THINGS TO DO in a large fancy font. Below it she typed: GET A LIFE, and enlarged, bolded and underscored it. Saving it into her My Documents folder, she chuckled as she closed down her computer.

Grabbing her coat and her purse, she almost ran out of the front door with no clear idea of where she was going, only that she was going thataway! And to hell with the writers group!