Help required... again!

Illness and stress have taken their toll this week and I've spent the last 2 days with my arse glued to my mattress as Mountain Man ministers to my needs.

The illness I think was my mother's parting gift to me as I left London last week as it has a familiar ring to it from when I phoned her before I got to her house last weekend and she complained of similar symptoms.

The stress has been to do with my current poetry course, which is driving me a bit crazy.

The illness I can do little about, but stay quiet and allow my body to get better. The stress is just ridiculous and so unnecessary, but dealing with it is so much harder to entertain. After all, I did decide to do the course and I could equally well decide not to do it if I so wanted. But there's pride at stake. I don't like to start things I don't finish.

The problem has been that this week's assignment has been about picking a gene and seeing where it takes me. There are, according to the internet, 19,000 - 24,000 genes depending on who you read. This is not a great start. Ok... next. What about chromosomes? That cuts it down considerably, but there are still 46 of those.

After quite a lot of umming and aahhing I went with colour-blindness, which is an anomaly of the 23rd chromosome. Hooray, I thought, at last I've narrowed it down! That lasted all of 3 days which have been spent reading all about the problem and even doing the Ishihara colour-blind test (I'm not, you'll be reassured to know), but it's so fascinating that I've written next to nothing, but I can tell you all sorts of interesting facts about it.

The poem has to be in tomorrow and I have precisely 10 lines of a crap poem. In my last poetry post, lamenting the paucity of my poetry skills, Bassman came up with a poem in 5 minutes, so if anyone has any offerings then please feel free. I need all the help I can get!