Bloody School!

I had to go back to school today. The title 'Bloody School!' was what was going through my mind this morning, but the day got increasingly better and then, at the end, slightly worse. I have to be in today and tomorrow, to get to know the ropes about next year (6th Form), and then it's back to the devastatingly long Summer Holidays. This little (ha!) blog entry will attempt to entertainingly relay the events in the life of me, William Wivell, on Monday the Thirteenth of July on this year Two Thousand and Nine.

The first thing that happened was the bus; a necessary stage in every school day of my life, the bus being the only possible mode of transport to school for me at such an early hour. The fact that it was the first thing that happened also proves to be constantly invaluable, as it handily provides me with a school backdrop later, within which the later stages of this tale will be recounted.
But I digress. Horrendously. Sorry. Right, cutting to the chase, I love my bus trip to (and, indeed, from) school. It is so relaxing, because I am the first person to get on the bus in the mornings and it is nice to be able to sit in an empty bus, trundling through the early morning countryside. These bus trips always instil a sense of peace within me - a lovely way to start any day, I think you'll agree.
Whenever I sit on this bus, pottering about the outlying villages on a rickety old bus, searching for passengers like a great metallic bee hopping from suburban flower to suburban flower, I start to meditate. And during these moments of meditation, I often come up with some pretty profound observations and conclusions that I never make otherwise. I had one of these epiphanes as I was soaring past Dunholme this morning...
I noticed that the reason I am so calm, sedate and good-humoured at school is due to my non-aggressive start to the day. Whereas many people are driven to school, thrown into the hustle and bustle of school life at the gates at 8:00 before they know what's hit them, I am eased into it gently. About a quarter of an hour passes before the next person gets on the bus after me. And then, shortly after that, a few other people join the bus. Gradually, the people who make school what it is, my fellow students, surround me, until I am fully immersed in academic life and in the correct mindset to tackle another school day. It's like being gently lowered into a bath, instead of being dropped into it from a great height every day, which would no doubt trigger hostility in some people.

I feel that I must speed up the pace of this blog, if only temporarily, and skip ahead to the arrival at school. We started by getting our timetables for the following two days at the 6th Form common room. I didn't have any free periods today, but I have shedloads tomorrow, so that's nice.
We then listened to a slightly haphazard introduction to 6th Form by our new Head of Year, Mr 'Built Like a Brick Shithouse' Clark. He seems competent enough, albeit with a constant air of vague confusion. I'm going to miss Mrs Grant, our HoY for Year 11. She was always in control.
The day got off to a flying start (yes, I know, I have only just started talking about the lessons) with a jolly old art lesson. Bloody good, it was, despite the teacher's uncomfortable attempts to be pally with us. I then had a psychology lesson, which could have started better - we spent about twenty minutes in the wrong classroom, due to a room change that never reached the ears of the class. Furthermore, the new classroom was at the other end of the school, so we missed a hefty chunk of that lesson. Despite this, our psychology teacher (whose name escapes me) was a darn nice fellow who managed to cram a ton of fascinating info into our noggins in a radically compressed lesson. Kudos to him, I say. Bloody kudos.

Not much happened after that for a while - period four was an unusual 'session' which was exactly like a free period in every way imaginable, right down to the fact that it was set in the fantastically comfy and jolly old common room and absolutely no work was done. I think it was an opportunity for people to change their A-Level options, but that didn;t apply to me, so I just kicked back for an hour.

And then along came period five and the exacerbating Mr Frimston. God help me, I love Frimston - he seems to know his stuff, but at the same time never quite seems to know what's going on around him. Things rarely, if ever, work in his presence. Evidence of this was to be witnessed in our Art and Design: Photography lesson, where most of the computers wouldn't log on.
The frustrating thing about this session - especially for me - was that the original plan was to practise a process called 'pixillation' where a series of rapidly-captured photos are played back as an animation, giving the captured subjects a jumpy, manic sense of movement. This sounded like tremendous fun, and I was really looking forward to it. Unfortunately, of the six or so cameras Mr Frimston issued out to us, only about two managed to get working with the remaining working computers, leaving most of the class, including me, impatiently twiddling their thumbs. In the end, the lesson plan was revised, and we looked at sketchbooks of former students. This saved the lesson, and Mr Frimston's bacon, but nonetheless, I really wanted to animate someone spinning in a computer chair as we had been promised...
Combined with the fact that rain had been incorrectly predicted today, meaning that I had to lug a massive raincoat about, and the fact that I am having KFC in a couple of hours (hip hip, hooray!), today has been quite a mixed bag.

Tuesday should be interesting...

This is the end of this blog post. Go away.