Have I got News for You?!

My summer is finally drawing to a close, which means that the pace is slowing down (almost imperceptibly, but I live in hope!). At the moment I am recovering from Greenbelt. It was my first time there, so I didn't really know what to expect, but I had a really great time! =)

Anyway...befooore Greenbelt... on the 14th August, to be precise, it was Results Day. It was kind of strange turning up at school in the middle of summer, but even stranger how everyone opened their results with a 'poker face'. Everyone was standing in little clusters with their friends, and everyone was saying, 'You go first', 'No! You first!', 'No, YOU go first!'.

I watched my friends' faces as they opened their results, and their facial expression gave absolutely nothing away. The thing is, you don't want to look too happy, because
a) if your friends are really disappointed in their results, you don't want to rub it in their faces, and
b) because you don't want to look like a loser. If you're grinning like an idiot at your 3Cs, and your friend bursts into tears at their AAB, I....erm..... don't really know what that could imply, but it's best to avoid complicated emotions and group dynamics during occasions such as these.

Anyway, eventually they forced me to open my results, and I stared blankly at the pieces of paper, not because I was being diplomatic, but because it took me a while to pick out the important numbers out of all the other numbers written there for camoflage or something...
In the end they snatched it off me and told me what I had. A for English Lit (and that was a high A, with an A in every module), and B for Biology. When I heard the Biology result, I nearly passed out from relief, because my teacher told me 2 weeks before exams that I had no hope of getting a B. But anyway, she said that to nearly everyone. And it was a totally respectable B - not skin of the teeth B! So HAAAAA! to her. I am going to have to try very hard not to gloat when I return my textbook. Or I may just sell it on Amazon and make some money out of her. They are changing the syllabus (dumbing down the system, no doubt! =P ), so they don't really need these books anyway.

So anyway, back to the story.... At this point, I knew I had AB...and I knew I needed ABB for Royal Holloway... but I had to go and pick up the result from the other school. By the time I got there, I was close to tears, because my friend and I had had to walk past a group of people panicking because they'd been given conditional offers from Royal Holloway, met the conditions, but been shunted on to a different course, because the department accidently gave out too many conditional offers (which must be illegal, surely?!). So, even if I got the grades, if I didn't pass well enough, I could have ended up doing English and Criminology or some other obscure combination like that. But it was all fine, coz I got a B in French. A VERY high B. I was 9 marks (out of 600) away from getting an A. 9 MARKS!!!! I did the maths (and then got someone who understands maths to check it for me) and I calculated that I was 1.5% off an A. 1.5% of 2 years!!!! What is that, like, an afternoon of school or something?!?!?! Grrrrr.....

So then I started ranting about how I was going to retake a module and get it up to an A, but my friends told me that as I had already got a place at Royal Holloway, to do the course I want to do, retaking any exams would be purely for my own pride. And then I felt bad... because a lot of my friends didn't get into the unis they wanted (some didn't get in at all). So, so make amends, I sat down with a copy of the Independent and went through UCAS clearing to help them find interesting looking courses in not too dodgy places.

But yeah, to cut a long story short, I'M GOING TO ROYAL HOLLOWAY NEXT YEAR!!!! =D

Though the next big step in the journey of my life (yeah...OK.... I'm taking the scenic route) is my gap year with Oxygen, which starts on Monday. It kind of crept up on me. I seem to have fooled myself into believing that a 3 month summer never ends.
But it does.
On Monday.