Big catch-up post!

It has been far too long since I wrote on here, and that’s purely because of two things – my exams, and moving house. We moved in to our 2 bed flat in Leicestershire on Wednesday 23rd March (it’s now the 13th April, so we’ve been here a good couple of weeks now). And in May and June I’ll be sitting my biology and Latin GCSEs. For anyone who’s confused about the fact that I’ve already sat a Latin exam, you can read about the difference here.

As far as being confident about my exams goes, I’m not very. I only had a few months to learn the curricula in the beginning – add to that moving house and other “inconveniences”, and you get my predicament. That could just be because I haven’t taken any past papers yet (because I haven’t studied the whole syllabus yet); maybe when I take one, I’ll get a good grade and feel reassured. As it is though, I just have this overwhelming sense of impending doom.

I feel like I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll recap: the Latin GCSE is split into two components: the literature component, and the language. For the literature part, I have to study and analyse a few passages in Latin and know how to translate them into English. To save myself some valuable translating time in the exam I’m trying to memorise the entire English translation, which will hopefully help with certain types of questions.

For the language component of the GCSE, I basically need to have a very large Latin vocabulary, and also know all the different tenses, declensions and conjugations, etc. There are a lot of those. I’m fairly confident about the language part, though; there are some really handy tools on the internet like vocab testers, and I’ve created my own Memrise course with the words that I personally struggle to remember.

For the literature part of the assessment, I chose to study some letters between the Ancient Roman governor Pliny and the Emperor Trajan; some passages from Julius Caesar’s account of how he invaded Britain; and an extract on how the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Alps on elephants to fight the Romans.

My first biology exam will be on the 17th May, and as it’s currently the 13th April, that gives me just over a month. I’ve still got 2 biology topics that I haven’t got to yet: inheritance and selective breeding. I don’t know how in depth those topics will be – hopefully not very! And I only just started human reproduction today, so technically I’ve got 3 topics (I’ve done 7 since I first started really cracking down on biology a few weeks ago). 3 topics doesn’t sound like much to do in an entire month, but I’ve also got to sit a ton of past papers to figure out the areas I’m poorest at, and spend time revising those areas. May the stress commence.

Luckily enough for me in my particular circumstances, the government has taken out some parts of all (I think it’s all) GCSE syllabi, due to schools being closed a lot during recent lockdowns. When it comes to biology, that means some entire topics were taken out and I don’t need to learn them anymore; and as for Latin, it means some passages (and some lines from the passages I mentioned above) have been excluded. This means that while I still have a lot to do, a fair bit of the curricula have been scratched.

Enough about exams though. Here’s what I’ve been up to recently in my spare time.

About a week ago, Tilly and I caught the train into Peterborough to meet our brother William. It’s about a half hour train journey for me and Tilly. We got there at about lunchtime, so we got a baguette and some cheese for a bit of a makeshift lunch!

For dinner we went to Pizza Express and got three giant pizzas to share between us. We got one with spinach and a fried egg on top because we’re adventurous, but we all agreed that it wasn’t very nice 😂 We also got a spicy minced beef one and a red onion & chicken one.

For the rest of the day, we just mooched about the shops and got Costa and some sweets! We had a great time and it was lovely meeting up with William after not seeing him for a couple of weeks since we moved. Hopefully we can do it again sometime.

So that’s a catch-up on everything I’ve been up to recently. I now intend to get back into the swing of writing at least weekly, but hopefully this post filled in all the gaps.