I do try, but compromise has never been my middle name (nor featured anywhere in my name, if it comes to that!) so I was pleasantly shocked by my reaction to the osetopath's advice this weekend.

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When I first went to see the osteopath at the beginning of last week, she diagnosed (amongst other minor irritations) that I had bursitis in my hip/buttocks) caused she thought by jogging. I was in discomfort, with minor aching rather than serious pain, so I was fine to continue other sports like swimming, she said, which I happily took to mean I could continue swimming practically as usual, though I dropped my usual 100 lengths to 60 as a small concession to the injury. I was wrong!

Having suffered a little after my 60-length swim, I decided to rest completely, which turned out to be the right thing to do, as I found out on Saturday she had meant I could continue swimming a gentle 10 or 20 lengths at a time! Being an 'all or nothing person', my immediate reaction was what's the point in that? (I like my sport to be a bit of a challenge, to end a session feeling like I've worked a little.) So we agreed that I was unlikely to be able to stick to gentle, low amounts, and better therefore to rest completely from everything other than pilates and walking.

However, by Sunday, I had already worked out a cunning plan, sorry, I mean careful compromise! Instead of swimming gently using my legs (preferably not breaststroke!), I would swim as fast and as much as I wanted using only my arms. That way I could exercise, but without hurting my bum. And this would even be better for me than merely resting, as sitting (or standing) in one position for any length of time places weight/strain on the inflamed area, whereas the water was helping to support the weight off my hips/bum.

Of course, the one fatal flaw in my plan was that my arms were unable to pull my weight by themselves for more than 10 lengths and I think I'm going to have to take it fairly easy anyway, or I'll end up with a repetitive strain injury in my arms as well as my legs and back!

Still, I have been making up for the lack of physical exercise with plenty of mental stimulation, including Carol Ann Duffy's excellent The World's Wife, which is incredibly well-written, being very witty, with lots of word play and great rhymes/partial rhymes.

I have also enjoyed four novels in a week. The last two - Body Surfing by Anita Shreve and Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale - have set me buzzing again with my own novel, already half-written in my head but still embryonic in its physical form on computer. I now can't wait to get on with this but that is causing a bit of a conflict with my poetry, as I have just finished printing the last of my poems in a bid to start weeding out my better work for a collection. (This in itself has been and up and down process. While I was pleased to discover some good poems I'd forgotten about, I also discovered a fair few cringe-making early poetry attempts.) Of course, this is just the very start of the process and if I really want to put together a proper collection, I will need to do a lot of assessing, editing and new writing...just as I will need to for my novel. Time and energy...there's never enough of it, at least not when I want it!;-)