Raffle tickets

First of the mocks came back. Biology. Sixty-nine percent. I suck. I'm serious. I will appreciate I didn't have much time to revise, and was at the end of a long day of mocks and so was losing momentum in a big way, but I didn't revise at all for Genes and Genetic Engineering and got twenty percent more. On going through the paper (yesterday's, that is) I have to say, some of the questions were so incredibly arbitrary. Which is a complaint I have about Biology in general - there is no underlying structure to anything. Which is probably why I'm so bad at it.

The truly ironic thing is that I also got sixty-nine percent for module one back in January, only at that point the nice people at AQA decided the paper had been truly horrific and did the whole upwards-moderation thing and gave us all shinyhappypeople marks. But this was a mock.

I have no doubt I've done worse in the others.

Moving on, then.

Today was my last day doing voluntary service. Accordingly, I ambled down to the library at about one to find Nichola embroiled in a codeword. A codeword is different from a crossword - they give you a bank of letters, and you have to fill them in and guess what the missing ones are. Which is an entirely useless explanation, but the Daily Mail codeword kept us occupied until Mrs Barry requested we actually do something useful.

So we retired to the library office and attempted to compose this year's library report. I wish I'd thought to keep a copy of it - it was staid and boring and descriptive, with the occasional flash of latent lunacy. As I have said before, our library is four hundred years old, has played home to generations of schoolchildren, and over time some of their exuberance has been absorbed into the stone until the building itself feels slightly different from other places. I'm pretty sure its influence accounted for the library report. Pretty sure.

We talked about The Big Read (remember me as Eeyore?) and the Carnegie reviewers and most of the other stuff. We actually compiled some new reading lists this year as well. Which doesn't sound like much - the reading lists are simply recommended reading for each year group and the sixth form - but they were originally compiled by Mrs Potter, who was (and presumably still is) unaware of the existence of any book publiushed after 1972. This is something I noticed even when I got my own first reading list at the tender age of eleven.

So, compiling new lists has been on the to-do list since Mrs Potter retired, but we only got round to doing it this year. It was a surprisingly fun job, and we got to go round the library sticking little coloured stickers on all the relevant books. There was much debate over which lists we should put Harry Potter and Winnie-the-Pooh on, so eventually we stuck both first-year and sixth form stickers on them.

This whole thing merited a few lines in the report, as did several other things. Another thing Nichola really wanted to mention was the Horrible History section. For non-Brits, the Horrible Histories are books for children written by a British historian called Terry Deary. They all have snappy, alliterative titles ("The Terrible Tudors", "The Rotten Romans","The Awesome Egyptians", etc - my personal favourite is "The Blitzed Brits") and are billed as "History with the squishy bits left in!" The idea is to tell kids about history with all the macabre details they presumably like (for example, the Tudors (well, the people, not the monarchy) emptied their chamber pots out of the window onto unsuspecting passers-by).

This whole digression has been to explain the fact we now have a stand devoted entirely to these Horrible Histories. Because of the lunacy-inducing influence of the stonework, inanimate objects within the library have names. Everyone knows Henry the book-return box, but the stand needed a name, and the sixth form library committee obliged. It's been immortalised in the report as Stan the Stand.

I had to go at about two, so we signed the report "Nichola (the outgoing) and Iona (the incoming)" and I went up to the common room to find Emma had gone without me. Boo, hiss.

My last day at the Stroke Association, as well. While I was there, I did a silly thing. I bought some raffle tickets, put them down for a minute and promptly forgot about them. Some time later, I remembered I'd put them in my empty coffee cup - which had gone into the dishwasher. Some time later than that, Betty-the-lady-who-does-the-teas came up to me carrying a dripping strip of wet raffle tickets at arm's length with the words, "Yours, I believe?"

I thanked her profusely, managed to unfold them and unstick them, and amongst the general laughter realised I really am going to miss these people. They tried their best to make me feel welcome, they all wave merrily at me whenever I see them in the village or at Lady Green, and they were just nice. I may go back next year; it depends on how much stuff I have to do as head librarian. They all wished me luck with my exams, as well - and said they'd watch out for any of my bylines in the summer.

Yeah, don't know if I've mentioned it - my work placement came through. This time I'm working with the Crosby Herald, rather than the Southport Visiter - but it should be a lot of fun, especially if I'm allowed to write articles the way I was last year.

Enough rambling for one day. I have to write a synopsis of Utopia before tomorrow, and the bloody book is three hundred pages long.