Don't talk to me about stress! (From Gazette & Herald)

Don't talk to me about stress!

I'M sure you'll all be sad to hear that this is my last column for a while, but I think you'll soon forget your woe when I tell you that I'm taking time off to take my GCSEs, so any writing that I would have done during them would be about as stressful to read as they would be to write.

To be honest, if I'd have wanted to stop writing from the moment exam stress started, then I wouldn't have written for the past two years.

As it is, I've been a real trooper through the trials and tribulations of coursework, mocks and hangovers, but after near-misses with my fist and the computer screen on many a miserable Sunday evening, with a mountain of work to do on top of writing this column, I've decided to admit defeat and pack away my pencil for a while.

But I'm not one of life's slackers - no siree, my exams have already started.

Last week was art, ten hours of trying in vain to paint my sleeping friend. Hell hast no fury like Hannah trying to paint a sleeping face, and help came in the form of "try more blue" from my art teacher.

So I tried more blue... and then I got the taste for colour, and, well, now my friend is little more than a mixing palate with green hair.

After the traumas of the art exam came another seemingly easy, yet deceptively hard exam - the drama performance.

After weeks of going in for early lunch because of 'rehearsals', we finally realised (on the day of the exam) why we were booked in for extra rehearsals in the first place.

Unfortunately, the examiner also probably noticed the benefits that a few more rehearsals could have brought our group, but by that time it was too late.

My rollers had fallen out, my line "fall short" had become "sure thought" and don't even get my started on the death scene.

The final exam I took before stopping my newspaper writing was my French oral.

I don't know how many ways there are in French to express complete incomprehension/hysteric tearfulness but I'm sure I managed them all and was, I'm sure, graded as being "suitably linguistically equipped for an emergency".

Nothing's gone exactly as hoped just yet, so that's why I'm stopping writing about it all for the while.

So wish me luck, readers, I've got English coming up and in all this stress I might just have forgotten my own language as well...

Updated: 12:29 Wednesday, May 19, 2004