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It’s time to finish these diaries! Eton – Saturday 9th July – the close. We had our last breakfast and then arrived for a talk about ‘applying yourself in interviews’ which might have been dull without the brilliant sketch in the middle. There was also stuff about applying to university complete with a mock UCAS form “that you can try filling in right now!” Wow, they’re keen…

My parents then arrived sparing me a coach journey back, and then we got to our grand presentation that we’d been practising for, ur, the best part of two days! Despite the slightly sombre tone the London bombings had given us Matthew and I still got people to laugh (it’s all in the charisma – not the script) and we finally got our hands on those all important certificates. Plus a nice CD of all our music work. Hurrah!

So that was it really. I have actually kept in touch with a few people, especially the lovely ones who said nice things about this website and Atif, who’s carried on the marketing debate via email. I leave you with a Guardian article about the whole thing.

Friday was the last ‘normal’ day at Eton and as usual we packed a lot in. We started with our final round of lessons including Physics, where we set off water rockets from the rooftops of Eton and Philosophy, where we finally debated for the last time whether the water rocket was really a water rocket or just a collection of bottles and elastic bands with some water in. No, not really. We had to argue for and against the existence of god. In my case, mostly against. I do believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn though.

We also had some more History – consistently the most interesting subject of the week which concluded in some History of Art showing in painting form how man has progressed from “Hey, I own nature!” to “Holy shit, nature’s fighting back!” And also some Maths, which proved something very interesting about 1.618. (See – more evidence against god. If god existed the ‘magic number’ would be something hilariously simple, like 42 or something.)
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Thursday at Eton began with another set of double lessons – starting with History which was my favourite of the week. We looked at Kennan’s “long telegram”, Novikov’s report and some lovely Pravda articles about Stalin (“strong, beautiful, wise and marvellous”) and I concluded that, basically, the Cold War happened because everyone was being a bunch of babies and if they had just sat down and agreed to be social democrats the whole thing would never have happened.

Then we had double Maths consisting of centroids and circumcircles and what-not. And look – there’s Hiten again!
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OK – I realise I’ve been slow at writing these up. To make it even more convoluted, I’ll blog about why separately

Wednesday morning at Eton, after the usual breakfast and ‘Thought for the Day’ stuff, began with double Physics. We did a lot on A-bombs \ H-bombs mainly as an excuse to watch cool videos of sheds being blown up in the US’s testing sites. Plus evidence for the Big Band kinda stuff. (The best bit of Physics came on Friday… so be patient!)

In double Philosophy I remember spending a lot of time arguing \ debating with Holly P. (The P stands for Primary Socialisation, now there’s an in-joke if ever I saw one.) The question – I have a body or I am a body? Answer [drum roll] – I am a body. Kinda. ‘You’ are an identity with a name created in concept only, but it’s pretty safe to say that if you blew the body up with one of the bombs we learnt about in Physics you can wave goodbye to you.
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