AS Biology Module 1: Core Principles

Last night, I had a list. It had things like "pens" and "tails" and "plastic bag" and "file" on it, and I had them all. When I wasn't looking Pedar added "cerebral hemispheres" and I had them, too. I had enough sleep, and I got out of bed this morning.

In hindsight, that was a bad move.

I went to school without major incident, met Bev and Meg revising in the common room, and at a quarter to nine, took myself down to the lower common room to get registered, get my seat number and go into the hall. I went, I sat down, I listened to the instructions, I watched the clock hands move to six minutes past nine.

I think it was the most difficult, disheartening, just plain worrying exam paper I have ever taken. Every second question was one I couldn't do, didn't understand, didn't know how to answer, didn't know how to apply knowledge to. And to make things worse, I ran out of time. I scribbled and scribbled and got more and more illegible, but I ran out of time and wanted to scream.

When I got out of the room at quarter past ten, I obviously compared notes with everyone else, and while no one found it exactly easy, no one seems to have made as much of a mess out of it as I have. Actually, I take that back - people did find it difficult. Sarah also said she felt like screaming. Overall, it was horrible. Truly horrible. And to add insult, Rice-Oxley has been prancing around telling everyone how "straightforward" it was. There are times when I loathe that woman.

Moving on. The next Extension Studies module is "Cooking on a Budget." Whoop. I don't want to cook. I can't cook. But they're making me cook. There's only four weeks of it, thankfully, but as if I needed another reason to hate Thursdays, I have to bring ingredients in. Next week is cooking in a wok. I have no idea what to cook in a wok. I suppose that's the challenge. Anyway, today's lesson wasn't so bad - we were told to go down to Sainsbury's and Kwik Save (sp?) and compare prices. So we (Becca, Bev and me) went, but we didn't do much, and came back for lunch. Becca was griping about Kat and Meg and Charlene and co. as they went to lunch without us, and I slipped down to the library, where I met Nichola. She seemed pleased to see me. I was pleased to see her, in any case, and we perched on a table and flagrantly contravened our own rules about silence. It was fun. Sadly, the conversation was cut short by Nicola and Kat coming down to retrieve me. They wanted to go and see "our" form for the Drama Festival. I hadn't met them before. They are a Lower Four form, L4G, and are rather... well, small. Becca said later that when we were doing the Drama Festival as participants, we thought the sixth formers assigned to us were hugely grown-up. I remember this quite well and don't feel a lot older than the form.

The few seconds' meeting with them did not go well. Becca was getting annoyed with the rest of the group - they were being annoying, lurking in the background and having a private conversation - and the form were somewhat dubious about things. Becca went round them all and found out that save two, they all want to be in the play. This has made the others in the group feel Snow White is a bad idea, because of its only having twelve parts, which I object to. No play is going to give them all parts while also being only half an hour long. They want to change to Daisy Pulls It Off. I don't want to do that. Becca definitely doesn't want to. She's coming round here tomorrow night so we can write the script. She says she'll stay over, and in the morning leave early.

I asked why she wanted to leave early, and the answer was, "Revision." That makes me lucky, I suppose - I have the weekend free. My exams will be finished by tomorrow night. Becca's going early, but I do have stuff to do. I need to get my eyes tested on Saturday morning, and in the afternoon I'm going out for coffee with someone, circumstances allowing.

So, um... yeah. Chemistry was one of the brighter spots of the day; Mrs Colvin thought our Biology paper would have been more suited to Chemistry module 5, which probably says something about the content of the paper. There was another question that was more maths than anything else - in any case, we all got different answers. I got 2.2, Becky O (who went into it thinking it was a Chemistry exam) got 27, Fidan got an answer in the region of five hundred and Sarah got 0.5. Huh. Rice-Oxley did visit us during us that lesson - if she'd been in a pantomime, she'd have been booed off stage. Anyway, Chemistry - I got an answer to a barium question that had been plaguing me, and we all got some extra education about polar molecules.

And that's my day, more or less. Becca, Meg and I walked home, Becca shouted at a pair of girls standing outside the newsagent - "Stand right in the middle of the pavement, why don't you?!" (complete with interrobang) - and later on, we all got drenched by a passing bus. The passengers on the bus found it all very amusing. I can't think why. In the end, I reached the station, said goodbye to Meg and started reading The Well of Lost Plots. No, I don't really have time to read; I ought to be revising.

I suppose there's one thing to be grateful for, maybe two things. If I'd revised twice as much I still wouldn't have been able to make head or tail of that Biology paper, and I can always resit the damn thing. Not that I want to do that; March will tell.

Hmm. In Biology, when in doubt, the answer is surface area. I said this in a Chemistry lesson, so I had to follow it up with its counterparts. In Chemistry, when in doubt, the answer is tetrahedral. Mrs Colvin found this very amusing, and supplied the third one. In Physics, when in doubt, the answer is...

...forty-two. Tomorrow, I shall write it as the answer to any question that perplexes me. Hopefully I shall be less than perplexed.