In January 1921, D.H. Lawrence and the ‘Q-B’ left Sicily for Sardinia. Six weeks later Lawrence penned his infamous travel book in which he puts forward a series of fanciful claims about the country he spent a total of nine days in. Lawrence is literature’s number one mard arse, raging against everyone and everything. He has made moaning an art form. The late Kevin Jackson described him as ‘the John Cleese of literary modernism’ in an essay I commissioned for Dawn of the Unread and Geoff Dyer applied what can only be described as ‘method writing’ when he imitated Lawrence’s restlessness in Out of Sheer Rage. Lawrence, however, is also incredibly perceptive, intelligent, and poetic, a writer quite like no other – though not for everyone.

Having read Sea and Sardinia numerous times, not least to mark the centenary of its publication, I created the above video which references Lawrence’s comical raging. There are eleven references to rage in the book, most of which are triggered by impudence – which gets fourteen references.

The video was created in Canva, a graphic design template programme which has a simple drag and drop interface. It has lots of themed templates for bespoke use – such as thumbnails for YouTube or banners for Facebook. It can be a bit clunky at times, but if you grit your teeth and think of the hours it would have taken you to come up with a layout, it’s worth it. My favourite feature is the fonts. There are so m-a-n-y…

Canva uses a fremium model, so you might want to subscribe to unlock some of the special features, but so far, I’ve managed to cobble stuff together via the basic subscription. You can upload your own images if you can’t find anything in their database and these can be animated, too.

In some respects, Canva is starting to have what I call the Wikipedia effect – I’ve used it for free so many times that I feel obliged to support them. Let’s hope I can actually get around to filling out an Arts Council form again…

In terms of identifying patterns in literary texts, this has become a lot easier with digitisation. The book is out of copyright and available online so you can copy and paste it into Word to find key words. To think that once upon a time, I used to go through a book with a highlighter pen…

This video is the 35th on the YouTube channel D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage.