The Final Year

The last part of my holiday consisted of a camping holiday with dad (where my DS game case proved its worth after the car ran over it, while keeping the games inside relatively unscathed) and a trip to Staffordshire university, after which it was the annual ritual of getting all summer work done within the last week.

When school started, there was an unexpected surprise, Mrs McArdle had returned to trinity, and she was attached to my form. She was my form tutor from Y7 to Y10 but left to further her career elsewhere. I also found that I’d lost an hour off of all my lessons except systems, leaving me with 2 days where I have only one lesson, one of which is at the end of the day, meaning I have to stay in school all day doing nothing until last period.

The only bit of summer work I had was research for systems, I’d already done the practical bit of that before i went on the expedition but i still had to write it up, problem was that my printer gave up while printing it, so i was left in the lurch; my solution was to printing it during my free period in the morning, otherwise, Mr Birch would have another excuse to bitch at me. When i presented it to Mr Birch in lesson, I expected him to have his criticisms, like a lack of analysis or conclusions in my work, that’s fair enough, it’s in the mark scheme, but when he said it was “too text heavy” I couldn’t believe it; it was like stepping back into GCSE ICT. Where in the mark scheme does it say that the research can’t have too much text?

This year has to have a silver lining. Wait, it does, it’s the last year, and there’s the ball at the end of it.

The Great British summer

The first part of my summer was busy and wet to say the least; the reality was that i didn’t get to relax properly for a fortnight after we broke up, and during that time it didn’t just rain, it pissed down.

This didn’t help the first activity of the holiday, the Duke of Edinburgh expedition. 4 days of bad weather, tiring physical exertion and the torture of being around a combined force of David Gopsil and Ian Dodd. The first day we were forced to change our route due to high winds, on the second day we got the same treatment but with a side order of rain and we couldn’t avoid it this time as we had to go into it to get to that night’s camp. The third day was better but the wind wasn’t with us at all so sailing was out of the question, although we did have a good campfire that night. the final day was a slow relaxed paddle as we found ourselves being an hour ahead of time, but we weren’t complaining as we didn’t have to paddle like the clappers and we got off a bit earlier.

The second event of the holiday for me (and Marie from my D of E group) was a UCLAN summer school, which was supposed to give a taste of university life, but what it actually consisted of was a 3 days of activities and workshops that really didn’t have much to do with uni at all. It wasn’t that bad though, the activities and workshops were great, and me and Marie made some new friends while there, one of which came to Carlisle at a later point in the holidays.

well that's it for the first half of the holidays.

One big update

It’s been ages since I've written to this blog so the following entries are basically what has happened since my last entry just before the exams