The New Adventures of Linus and Rattina

Deep in the uncharted backwaters of the lab, there is an unhappy dead rat named Linus, disembowelled and dyed yellow, who spent the morning with legs splayed and nailed to a board in an attitude of crucifixtion. I would venture to say that Linus, bless him, had a better day than I did.

Before I go on, a few words concerning Linus. He is a dead rat, bred for dissection purposes, and I spent much of yesterday alternately shrieking and examining his digestive system. Once you get accustomed to the idea, it's not actually that hard to just get on with the dissection; the difficult part was easing the rat out of rigor mortis and breaking its limbs. Sarah freaked and I ended up doing hers for her, and then paused and asked, "Is it disturbing that I find it so easy to break rats' arms?"

And this was all before we put the pins through the paws with the hammer, so perhaps I spoke too soon. Around that point Mrs Bush came in, wanting to have a word about D of E; Rice-Oxley bounded across and said cheerfully, "Perhaps you'll want to step outside..."

Unfortunately, it was too late - she had just caught sight of Fidan's rat, Rattina, with intestines spilling out over the bench, and the colour visibly drained from her face. I wished for a camera. Rice-Oxley gently steered her out of the room, and presumably she recovered. Later, Fidan decided it would be a good idea to pierce her rat's colon. I freaked slightly. Strangely, it's not the internal organs that bother me, but the rat's tail. It disturbs me at a visceral level.

Anyway, moving on, this is a four-day dissection, so the rats reappeared this morning. They are named so we each know which is our own - mine is Linus, Fidan's is Rattina, Rice-Oxley's is Roxanne, and the others are Daffy, Ducky, Trevor, and Marigold. There may be more, but I can't remember them all. So I retrieved Linus and repinned him to the board, all ready to examine his heart and lungs, when we were peremptorily dragged off for photographs for the prospectus. This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move. Thankfully I didn't have to submit to DofE, only Oxbridge entrants, but it was still painful in the extreme and I would have run off to the village for food afterwards, only I realised I had a Chemistry mock in five minutes and my doom was therefore imminent. So I went down to the library for a moment and shamelessly stole all of quackaquacka's food. While she was indulgently feeding me crisps, Rice-Oxley heard me moaning about lack of breakfast and lack of time to obtain it, and went off to the staffroom to get me some shortbread. I was surprised and rather touched by the gesture.

And the mock wasn't that bad, either. I was more than a little scared, seeing as this was a two-hour synoptic module five, but I worked my way through methodically enough, feeling like I knew what I was doing, more or less. I only started panicking when I realised I had two long-answer questions left to do and ten minutes to do them in. I didn't come close to finishing, and trundled out despairing at the thirty marks I'd just lost. And then went to Politics, a lunchtime lesson that meant I had no lunch, because when I got there they'd stopped serving.

So by the time I got to English to be chewed out for lack of printed-out coursework, I was ready to stop the universe 'cause I wanted to get off. Five minutes without anyone getting at me seems to have been too much to ask for today. In the end I went to the village for (cold) pizza bread and to dispatch a parcel to lysana, got back for yet more Politics and walked home pissed off with the universe, still. There was more happy news waiting for me at home - I have lost my GCSE certificate. Actually, no, I haven't - my mother has lost it, for once, because I would not, could not, look after it and gave it to her for safekeeping, and in the post was a letter from AQA saying they will not replace it. There is also a letter from Balliol wanting to know where the hell is it.

Oh, and oh - tomorrow is the last library committee meeting ever, and thanks to our hypocritical, simpering, bureaucratic pain-in-the-arse headmistress and her obsession with the prospectus photos, I can't wear mufti, and can't wear uniform because I'm going to work afterwards, so will have to carry clothes around with me like a first-year. As for the committee meeting, there will be cake. I hope. If nothing else dire happens, which seems likely.

More mocks on Thursday and Friday, and more cutting up of Linus's insides. If I hammer one more pin through his paws, I'm going to shatter them into tiny little pieces. In the meantime, I feel the urge to eat chocolate and read pr0n coming on.