It's all over!

Well, I told you I'd let you know how I got on, so here's the short account of the morning ....

I thought I'd better have something more substantial than my usual home made fruit smoothie, so fried some organic mushroom and sliced pepper with tomato and served it up on two sliced and toasted gluten-free multi seed rolls.  So far, so good.

I was really enjoying my cooked breakfast when I felt a little pain in a pre-molar, ouch.  A bigger ouch every mouthful I took!  I realised that I must have a seed stuck in  my tooth, so went to excavate it with a toothpick.  I tried to just flip it out, but it hurt every time I touched it, then, horror of horrors, it started to sink further in to my tooth, alongside an old filling!!!  Seconds later, half my tooth was sitting in my mouth, along with the guilty, black seed, which appeared to be none the worse for its experience, unlike me and my poor tooth!

I managed to eat the remainder of my (by now cold) breakfast without chewing too many times on the "wrong" side of my mouth!  What a nuisance, and the exam was at 0920, so my plan was to have an hour in the library first, so no way I could contact the dentist to make an emergency appointment:(

So, I read my copious notes, and felt quietly confident that I know my stuff, so to speak.  Which is true, I've worked, not shirked, and my grades have been good.  I've loved my time at university, met some great people, and learned an immense amount.  But ..... my memory is not the best:( 

So, seated with several other lambs to the slaughter candidates for the exam, I put the three pens I'd brought with me on the table.  Three pens, you ask?  Yes, three pens, you never know what's around the corner.

The instruction came, complete the front of the exam paper.  I pressed the end of my pen down and whoosh!  It exploded!!  Small pieces of metal and a spring flew away from me on their own sweet trajectories.  Fortunately, all the pieces were gathered up for me, but, despite laughing, I was thinking "Oh dear, things go in threes, first the tooth, now the pen, what's next?"  Boy, I'm glad I'm not superstitious!!!!

It's OK, my friend behind me assured me, I've just broken my nail.  Whew, no problems then.  Or does it have to be the same person breaking three things?  Well, the second pen refused to write, too.  I scribbled frantically, but all I achieved was a hole in a spare piece of paper!!!!  How could this happen?

I pieced together the exploding device, and it wrote for a while, in fact I nearly completed my details before it died again:)  I re-repaired it, yes, of course it's a real word, people are always re-repairing things, ask anyone, and completed the front, I also filled in the details of the exam, room, module etc on the small form, and handed it in, then realised that I'd put April down, not May for the month!  Was that the third thing????

I turned over the exam paper and read the questions.  I kid you not, I was spoilt for choice!!  There were several questions I could have answered well, fortune was smiling on me.

Now I know fortune was laughing in my face:(  The third thing to go wrong was the sieve I have for a brain.  You know what a sieve is, right?  Yes, of course you do.  Sadly, all the mesh of wire that retains the stuff in the sieve all disappeared at once, so there was nothing left to hold all the information in, and it dissipated in the blink of an eye.  I expect the cleaners wondered what all the stuff was they found on the floor later, assorted wonderful words of erudition, jumbled and trodden on.

So, the questions were great, my answers, alas, were not so great.  I could have written for another hour or so, then maybe I would have mentioned Foucault, or aberrant discourses and the way in which they form.  As it was, my words remained pretty monosyllabic.  As a first year, I would have considered I'd done well.  As a third year - well, what do you think?

People think I'm unduly pessimistic, but I was only confident of achieving 60 to 63%, I doubt I'm anywhere near that, so even if I do really, really well in the essay part of the module, I'll be lucky to be at a 2:1 level for this module.

Consequently, all aspirations to a further three years of academia are off.  I'll see what the local further education college is offering for September, and register with them for something.  There are lots of brain challenging opportunities out there - it's just a matter of searching them out.

And, I'll continue to write my short stories, maybe even a longer one.  Watch this space!