What a week! The pressures of essay deadlines and lecturers talking about exams is really starting to hit hard. Managed to submit my first English essay on time and fairly happy with it. Put myself under a lot of pressure to do as best a job of it as I could but discovered that writing an academic essay is very different from a feature article for a paper or magazine. Talked to my tutor about this - I am used to getting my 'results' as phonecalls from people saying how much they loved my articles... this time I'm getting GRADED. It's been a long time since I was so nervous! Must have spent two hours making sure my bibliography was perfect LOL.

There are only six more weeks before the exams - plus three more essays to be done before the end of the semester - and now moving into serious study mode. Everyone is feeling the sense of urgency about working. We all have essays to write and those of us studying a language (or two in some cases) have regular tests and assignments to add to the workload. Finally got the results of our last Spanish test and although I was hoping for a B, managed another A (my vocabulary let me down as expected but did fine on grammar). I feel that I'm giving myself too much to live up to as there isn't a hope of my remembering everything I'd need to get an A in the exams.

All the studying means that I've not being doing much in the way of having fun. It's just so nice to come home in the evenings, eat dinner and collapse in front of the tv for some mindless entertainment. Somehow managing to do a bit of housework and even cooked the dinner yesterday, but mostly it's all done for me. Yes, I'm well spoiled at home and loving it. The weather has been atrocious and I even get driven to and collected from college most days. My BH really is fantastic :-)

Today saw me attending probably my last afternoon Celtic Civ lecture. The Wednesday morning lectures are brilliant but, for me, the other two are just a period when I can nap in peace before moving on to something more interesting. This afternoon's offering by our lecturer was no better than usual but, just before we were finally released to attend something more riveting, he made such an awful error (in my judgement) that I almost shouted out a correction and came close to going down and punching him! As you can tell, I'm still fuming about his total inadequacy as a lecturer. Won't go into details but, suffice to say, his gaffe was on a par with Stephen Hawking mentioning that he knew that there was someone called Galileo and that he might have lived somewhere in Europe and invented some sort of useful tool for science but he wasn't sure what ... and then moving on. Yes, it was THAT bad! As it was a subject about which I just happen to have a huge personal library which I've read for years and the place he was waffling about happened to be somewhere I've been to and studied I DO know what I'm talking about. It was like sacrilege. However, I somehow kept my temper and just walked out.

Okay.... that's enough ranting for tonight. The weekend is beckoning and I plan to enjoy some family time before knuckling down again when we get three more essay titles next week. Liverpool v Chelsea on Sunday ... a tasty Sunday lunch in store :-)

'Tis late and I've a 9am lecture in the morning. Time to go and try and get some shut-eye.