English Literature exam today, on Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance and Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife. Bumbled along happily with Wilde for an hour, although sadly not in a particularly witty section of the play, but with a decent enough question all the same. Then we got to Duffy – where the question was about how a male journalist (Mark Lawson, I found out later) said he ‘felt threatened’ by Duffy’s poetry.
[Sigh]I’m not saying it was a bad question that shouldn’t have ever been set. But it just seems like, every single year, AQA’s format is:
Q. Duffy is a Big Scary Lesbian Feminist, eh eh?
A. No, because….
Yeah, sure, it’s a nice way of catching out the 0.01% of readers who don’t like Duffy. But for the rest of us, isn’t it possible to move on and discuss the themes that actually are in the poetry? She says herself her work is “not to threaten men or anything as tedious as that” – so please, move on!
There’s not much to report about my Maths exam this morning. It went reasonably well, with the usual exam hiccoughs along the way. Strangely, I found Core 1 slightly harder than Core 2 even though it’s obviously ‘easier’ – mainly because I couldn’t check things back on a calculator. It would have saved me from the embarrassing detour as I forgot what 270 / 3 is, anyway… 
I mean, on a calculator paper, if you have to prove that something or other is 12, and you do it, and your calculator tells you it’s 12, and you write it down… how wrong can you be? Fingers crossed anyway!
Next Exam: Friday, English Literature. Should be fun. Then it’s half term anyway, and a couple of days in Paris, ‘revising’ naturally.
By the way, it’s good to see that the plans to change the system so you apply to university after A-level results come out are rumbling ahead, albeit slowly. The present system is so obviously broken – you wouldn’t apply for a job before passing your degree, would you? All it does it benefit the arrogance of private schools who over-estimate grades, pushing state school students out of the system altogether before the results come out.
Lovelydarlings! That’s a LucyPhrase (TM) for Lucy who complains at a paucity of shout-outs. I realise the blog has been looking a bit bare this week, so let’s catch up with the fun and entertaining life that is Me.
Big Brother. No, I didn’t watch it. No, I’ve never watched it because it’s utterly terribly boring. However, in order to stay vaguely in the cultural loop, I did the slightly evil thing of getting someone else to watch it and feed back to me any important details, so in case of accidental conversation I won’t suddenly say “Oh Mickey, he sounds nice” or “Pfft, they’d never steep so low as to put a guy with Tourette’s in there, stop being stupid.” Incidentally, next year I predict a Nazi, a foetus, a robot and a junior ‘celebrity’ member of the Taliban. My money’s on the foetus for the public vote, although the surprise entrance of a dead llama half way through might just swing it.
Back in the real world – Monday is 3 Hour Maths Exam Day With Extra Capital Letters For Emphasis. I’ve just finished another practice exam right now, and I can do it all except for Prove that (cos x + sin x)^2 + (cos x – sin x)^2 = 2. If you would like to telephone vote your answer in, feel welcome. (To anyone worried, I do have a vague idea of how it might be done and I will do it before tomorrow. Promise.)
Yesterday was examy too, 2 hours of English mock at 9am on a bright and lovely rain rain rainy Saturday morning. Still, at least Holly was nice enough to phone me afterwards with what I got. (She read my paper after I left… which is, ur, an interesting tactic in an exam.)
Oh and I should also mention Doctor Who, and <spoiler alert> the departure of Mickey Smith to a parallel universe (roll over to read) which I certainly didn’t see coming. Neither did my mum, who is most upset and threatening not to watch until Russell T changes his mind.
This is not forgetting Eurovision, of course, although there isn’t a great deal to write about. The tactical voting, well, it’s gotten a bit tiresome now. Someone has even written up a paper on it, including this useful diagram of what has happened in the past couple of years. Having said all that, it’s nice to know that Ireland still feel sorry enough for us to swing us some votes… 
Sorry to build up into a disappointing climax, but Physics Practical went really quite well after all. Sure, I forgot the units of resistivity, and used volts instead of millivolts (although Hiten did that too…) but that shouldn’t dent me too much and overall it was OK and much better than it could have gone. So yay.
In more interesting news, a fly decided to kamikaze into my eye on the way home!
Right, have had a complaint from Clare saying that she isn’t mentioned often enough on my blog. Sorry, Miss Clariss. Even if you were the shout-outee a mere, ooh I don’t know, 2 weeks ago.
You know what? I’ve run out of things to say. *Posts*
Tunnel visioned, that’s me. I have Physics Practical tomorrow morning. As you can tell I’m really confident about it all 
although actually, I feel ever so slightly better now that I know how to measure with Vernier Calipers in millimetres rather than inches!
As soon as the Practical is over, my mind will turn over to Maths for Monday, and then afterwards English for next Friday, etc etc. Anything else can and will be neglected, exitus acta probat. And yes, that includes you, personal statements! I don’t want to even think about applying to university any more. Not. Interested. Even a little bit. Wait until after AS exams, thank you very much.
However my propencity to be distracted is never ending, hence I am also participating in Babble’s amazing Summer CD Big Swap, which Pingu slyly convinced me to do last night.
Shout out! To Amber, one of the poor Year 8s who now blog themselves, and much better than I do too. There are loads more: Marion, Izzy, Zenobia – more links on her site.
Talking of websites, I’m getting the itch again to do something to my own. Summer holidays, and you never know what might happen…
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
