Which brings me rather haphazardly onto my main point. I wouldn’t exactly call myself a ‘hardcore’ gamer, but I do spend a heck of a lot of time wrapped up in RPGs when I should be working. Most people don’t take me seriously when I explain this, and laugh when I challenge them (metaphorically speaking) – because I’m a girl – until I win and flat-out humiliate them in front of their mates.

It’s never been something I could quite get my head around. Why should it matter what sex a gamer is? It’s not a boy thing or a girl thing in my opinion – it’s a skill thing. There are probably an awful lot of girl gamers out there in the world, but are too afraid of being shot down by the boys who think they’re better by default to admit it. It shouldn’t matter if you’re good at games or not, anyway – what matters is if you have fun. Games are, after all, meant for entertainment.

I checked the tracking on the website, getting worried that something had happened to it. According to the website, it had been unsuccessfully delivered to our house and a notice had been left. Was there a notice? Had the doorbell gone? No. I rang up the service it was supposed to be coming with – but they said that it had nothing to do with them. They gave me a number and shrugged me off. In a state of panic by this point, I called around, repeatedly being handed other numbers. No one seemed to know where my precious parcel was. After almost an hour, I finally got hold of a woman who told me the package hadn’t been delivered at all. It was sitting in a depot somewhere with customs charges – £29.88! So after an evening of panic and worry that I’d somehow missed the note or that it had been delivered to the wrong house, they expected me to drive out to some distant building and pay as near as made no difference to £30 for messing me about like that? Wow. I knew they were bad, but I never thought the postal service could be so inept.

(sarcasm)

I saw two christmas trees during the four-or-so hours we were out. Two. Only one of which was moderately impressive. Aside from those, I spotted a single one of those tacky star-shaped plastic lights and two or three sets of streamers. Very festive. At least they tried.

I think that there is some kind of invisible forcefield surrounding Widnes. In every single part of the country, it seems, this cold and pretty white powder called snow has fallen from the sky. What’s Widnes got? Frost. And ice. I’m surprised that I actually managed to walk to the bus stop this morning without falling over.

I’m sorry, but I thought that ‘holiday’ meant something along the lines of ‘break from work’. I actually have a thesaurus here with me (no dictionary, so it’ll have to do), and I can give the definition to you. Here it is – holiday noun. 1 VACATION. break, hols, leave, recess, rest, time off.

I understand that we need to do a little bit to keep our brains working over the weeks of partying and cake – but asking us to write multiple full-on essays and articles and pages of annotations (et cetera) is going a bit too far, isn’t it?

Another thing that irritates me is what happens when you get sick in term-time. You spend days at home, in your bed, coughing your guts up and generally feeling absolutely awful. When you finally recover enough to drag yourself into school or college or whatever, all of your teachers instantly shove a list of what you have to do to catch up in your face. This is fine – perfectly understandable, in my opinion – until they get to the part where they want it in for the next lesson. I don’t understand how they can expect you to have it all done instantly, especially when you’ve had a good few days off at once and are still feeling under the weather.

The reason for this rant, I suppose is because I recently came down with a mild case of (swine?) flu for a solid week. The moment I recovered, after spending a few horrible days in college without the ability to breathe, I caught the exact same thing again and ended up back in bed. In those few days between periods of semi-consciousness, I just managed to catch up with what I missed. When I went back in the second time, I came away with a massive list of chunks of work I needed to complete in order to not fall behind. I even had a rather awkward one-on-one session with my English tutor to cover what I missed – and am still tying up all of the loose ends to this day.

All I’m saying, to summarise, is that tutors should take into consideration the facts that (a) teenagers have social lives and want to enjoy holidays while they still get them and (b) there is only so much work that is physically possible for someone to complete in such a short space of time.