Today the A level results are published in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I remember vividly when I found about my A level results. ccarlstead at flickr I was working in a summer camp with a friend of mine. It was a day camp and the kids were from about five upwards. I was helping with the youngest group and she was helping with the older ones, so I was doing a lot of the singing and dancing type stuff that seemed to come more naturally when I was 17. I asked my Dad to call the school for my results. I can’t remember why it was done that way, but basically they could call the School secretary and she’d tell parents/students. It was a small school anyway. So my dad called the centre were we were working - I asked my dad to get my friend’s results too (she agreed)...

Decisions decisions, eh? Maybe I’ll give it another bash. Let’s see how long it goes this time. I ‘did the math’ and if I don’t want to delete this blog or lose the address, then I need to keep paying for it. I would want to ‘own’ the address of wherever I blog, and am far too tight to pay for it twice (plus the two personal ones I use for e-mail). So what’s been happening in my life since I last posted? Well, K and I have bought a house. Well, we’re in the process of buying one anyway. As much as I love living in Edinburgh (cut me in half and you’ll see Edinburgh Rock all the way through), it’s just too expensive to buy here at the moment. Particularly for what we’re looking for (2 bedrooms, house, garden, driveway)....

We all have ambitions; things that we write in a little mental to do book. Unlike a real-life to do book, they’re a bit more interesting than ‘buy milk’ or ‘post letter’ or ‘hide nail gun’. They’re often loftier goals that would take a lot of time or cost a lot of money to complete. They could range from swimming with exotic sea mammals, writing a novel (about an exotic sea mammal framed for a murder he didn’t commit. Of course he didn’t commit it; he was in the sea for crying out loud. Oh the murder of the star fish? Well I wouldn’t know what to say about that) or maybe your ambitions don’t involve exotic sea mammals at all. But the problem with these ambitions is that they’re not an everyday occurrence, so it’s very...

So on the Wednesday morning I found I was feeling terrible. It varied a little bit over time, but only between the feeling of a bad hangover and a really bad hangover. I had a headache, my stomach was churning, I couldn’t concentrate. Unfortunately, I had a relatively important meeting scheduled for 11.30, so I hung on. In an hour or two, given a couple of paracetamol, even the worst hangover should start to improve slightly. There again, it couldn’t actually be a hangover, since I hadn’t had anything much to drink on Tuesday night. Possibly some kind of food poisoning? I began to feel as if I really wanted to vomit, but that never quite became possible. The meeting was postponed until the early afternoon. By now I had given up any attempt to do actual work: I had the...