Letter of the week

From today's Guardian letters page:

I am saddened by the unhelpful attitude of John Simpson, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, for declining to take on board the concerns of the British Potato Council, campaigning for the removal of the term 'couch potato' from the dictionary - which is deterring people from making more use of this nutritious vegetable ('Couch potato label gives veg a bad name', June 20).
As one who has spent much of his life in the fruit and vegetable business, I can vouch for the fact that there are a great many terms in the English language that give needless pain to the sensitive greengrocer. We deplore derogatory descriptions such as 'cabbage head', 'prune face', 'cauliflower ears'. These have a negative impact on our business by making all such produce unattractive. Who is going to buy raspberries if people insist on blowing them?
Even seemingly innocuous terms like 'fruity' and 'nutty' give grave offence to vegans such as myself. People should show more sensitivity and refrain from all such loose talk.

Jeremy Hart,
Buckfastleigh, Devon

I'm still trying to work out if this guy is being entirely serious. The worrying thing is, I get the feeling he is. Although of course, I could just be missing something. Answers on a postcard... (Incidentally, I have to say I have never heard anyone use 'prune face' as an insult. Suddenly, it seems like there's been a huge hole in my life all these years.)

The Exam from Hell

Yesterday (as the title of this post may have suggested to the intelligent amongst you), I sat the Exam from Hell. It was several hours after it ended before I was finally convinced that if it was a nightmare I'd have woken up by now, and therefore I must actually be awake. (Incidentally, am I the only one who gets that feeling sometimes where you seriously believe you may be dreaming? It's scary, because you don't know if anything's real! Argh, the uncertainty!) Anyway, since then I have been to sleep, woken up and subsequently spoken to several people who have the same memories of the same nightmareish exam as me, so I'm working on the assumption that it was real. (Grrr.)

Weirdly, I had a feeling that the t-shirt I was wearing (my funky nun t-shirt, no less) might bring me bad luck, even though there's really no good reason why it shouldn't bring the best of luck. Well, other than the fact that the transfer had cracked, and as we all know, a cracked nun brings seven years' bad luck! (Oh, wait, that's mirrors. Hurrah!) Nonetheless, I told myself I was being silly and tried to persuade myself the nun would watch over me like a benificent angel, ensuring the long-dreaded History paper went smoothly. But oh no. Where was my guardian nun when I needed her? Laughing at my pain, no doubt. Bitch.

Our troubles began when we opened the first of the two History papers we were sitting that day and realised something was up. The exam board had decided - just for a laugh - to completely change around the format of the exam and the style of the questions, without telling us of this before hand. Oh, AQA, you are a card. (Bastards.) Now, as anyone who's taken AQA History to any level knows, the scariest thing about the exams is timing, because they always set the time limit for the exam at roughly half the time you would sensibly need to answer all the questions properly without setting fire to your hand. So having your carefully-drilled-into-you timing structure for answering the paper turned upside down is not the most helpful thing that can happen at the beginning of your A-level. Not only that, but the first question was a usefulness question. A usefulness question! I hadn't done one of those since GCSE, so I dredged up vague memories of provenance and relevance and cobbled together a half-baked answer, which rambled on for about twice as long as I usually spend on 10-mark questions.

Panicking at how behind I already was, I rushed on to the second question, the more familiar crazy three-regime, four-source essay, which is hard enough at the best of times without the title being something confusing about "conflict and antagonism". I got halfway through my answer to this question (which was a load of old bobbins because my mind was all in a flap) before realising that not only had I not made reference to any of the source material (which you need to do to get anything over half marks) - I hadn't even read two of the sources! As this realisation dawned on me, there was a beautiful moment when I thought, "Ah, I see what's happening, this is a nightmare! This is all going too absurdly wrong to be real. It's a panic dream and I'm about to wake up. Thank God for that." As the moments lengthened and I remained stubbornly sat in Room Bloody 14 with the Exam from Hell still in front of me, I realised that I was most probably awake and should get on with the exam rather than waiting to wake up.

Eventually, I finished my hashed-up second essay and moved on to the Stalin essay (which I now had just over 20 minutes to write, as opposed to the recommended 45.) The annoying thing with that was that it was a really easy title and one that I'd written a really good essay on quite recently, but I was unable to answer it properly because it was the most I could do to make it legible and looking vaguely like an essay before the time ran out. Argh.

The second paper was less hellish, barring an entire source covering a period we hadn't studied, but I am now very glad I didn't take History to degree level. The residual trauma of that exam could have ruined my university career.

(I realise that I've gone on and on and on about something very very boring, but I felt the need to vent, and what are blogs for if not for venting?)

Quote of the week

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

- Anatole France

Three down, seven to go

So, my exams started today - English Literature and General Studies. I'm not really sure how they went, but I suppose "as well as could be expected" is about fair. And I managed to work the words "bokeler", "forpined" and "ercedekene's" into my Chaucer essay, not to mention crowbarring four random names into my Rover essay despite having next to no idea who any of them were (Anne Marshall Quin, Lady Castlemaine, William Wycherly and John Dryden, just for the record), so I'm counting it as a victory. Well, except the bit in the General Studies 'Science, Mathematics & Technology' paper where they started throwing crazy science words at me, like 'angular mean speed' and 'hyperbolic' and 'parabolic', and I realised that two years without any science have made any science-related knowledge I may ever have possessed trickle slowly out of my head, never to return. This saddened me briefly, but then I realised that I have now sat the exam which probably constitutes the last time I would need such knowledge in my everyday life (and even then, 'need' is a bit inaccurate, considering that my General Studies grade in no way affects whether I meet the conditions for my university offers). So, in summary, all is well. Well, except for the imminent Psychology exam and associated frantic learning of crazy names like 'Jellinek' and 'Abey-Wickrama', but as a wise man once told me, "It can't all be strawberries."

It's not rocket science

According to the website of Mensa UK,

"1 in 50 people have an IQ in the top 2% that makes them eligible to join Mensa."

I've sat here thinking long and hard to try and come up with some kind of mocking comment that could make this astounding insight any more hilarious than it already is, but really, it does it all by itself.

Nuns: the verdict

Since I acquired a t-shirt sporting the legend "nuns are our friends" and a rather snazzy cartoon nun (I've just realised I never blogged about my shirt in the first place! How shocking!) I have had the following responses whilst wearing it out and about:

"I thought nuns were evil" (x2)
"Nuns are cool" (x2)
"I'm scared" (x1)
Pervy looks from strange men (x2)

Now that I come to add them up, it would seem that there is no clear overall positive verdict here. I suppose it all depends on whether you count pervy looks as a positive response, and to be honest, I don't. Nevertheless, I'm hopeful that if I continue wearing it, the word of groovy nuns will be spread such that the scared, unenlightened or pervy will see the error of their ways.

Now, in the words not quite of Shakespeare, get thee to a nunniness!

Public service broadcasting

Now, it's very easy (not to mention fun) to mock Channel 5 for being naff and tacky and so forth. But if I'm going to do that, I feel it's only right to give it credit where credit's due, and it seems that credit is, at the moment, most certainly due. I'm talking about the new series Big Ideas That Changed The World, in which, well, big ideas - like capitalism, Christianity, democracy and environmentalism - are explained by leading experts in that subject. And when I say leading experts, I don't mean some beardy bloke from a university, I mean people you've actually heard of - Desmond Tutu, Tony Benn, Josef Stiglitz (okay, most of you probably haven't heard of him, but I have) and so on.

Now, this is the kind of thing that gets me really, really excited, which is no doubt very loserish, but hey - that's why I'm doing Social and Political Sciences at uni when most of you probably wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Still, I think you should watch Big Ideas That Changed The World, because it looks truly, truly ace. Frankly, I think the BBC should be ashamed of itself, using public money to make rubbishy reality shows and Out-Take TV while Channel 5 - I mean, come on, Channel 5 - are trying to explain things that really matter in a 45-minute slot at 7.15pm on Tuesdays (that's 7.15pm on Tuesdays - put it in your diary).

I'm deeply irritated that I missed the first one (Communism, narrated by Mikhail Gorbachev - Gorbachev, for Christ's sake! Am I the only one who's hugely impressed by that?), so I thought to make up for it I would plug the series on my blog and hope some people listened. Tomorrow's is feminism with Germaine Greer, and I intend to watch it despite having several good reasons not to (namely, I find Germaine Greer faintly irritating, I'm not all that interested in feminism and I have truckloads of revision to do). You should too.

You never know, you might learn something.

Thou shalt have a fishy on a little dishy...

Oh my Lord.

My cat has just eaten one of the fish.

Well, "eaten" isn't really an accurate word. He certainly caught a fish out of the pond, although God knows how. But "half-eaten" would probably be a more accurate description of what he's done with it. (Those with a nervous disposition or a sensitive stomach - I'm thinking of Lisa here - may wish to stop reading at this point.) You see, he's kindly left a chunk of it behind as evidence of his dastardly deed.

I suppose you're asking for it when you have a fishpond in close proximity to a cat, really. But still, on the return home from a pleasant and successful shopping trip, that doesn't make the sight of a mangled fish torso (I don't know if fishes technically have torsos, but in my traumatised state I can't think of a better word) awaiting you at the bottom of the stairs any less distressing. Yes, that's right, no head, no tail, just a fish body and some scales. I don't even want to think about the implications of that.

Ugh.