Home alone and nobody to comfort me in my darkest hour

Exam Diary: I spent last night all alone in the wilds of Sligo with no one to comfort me in my darkest hour.

I'd like to say that my family was out rescuing a stricken lamb or herding our livelihood out of a violent storm, but that would be false. My family was in Longford, in Aldi to be exact, availing of a special offer on fishing rods.

I've never been much of a fan of Nostradamus, but I found myself hoping the old fellow had hit the spot this time. The sixth of the sixth of the sixth passed off without incident however - the only brimstone in evidence spewed from me when my mother walked in the door. She insists she was only gone for an hour. Like hell she was.

Having survived the Day of Beast, I felt pretty confident that I could get through a Dark Night of the Soul. Sure enough, I woke at 7.30 all fresh and optimistic and after a bracing bowl of cornflakes, I headed for the bus. We were making tentative attempts at conversation on the journey.

The subject was Bishop. Normally, it would be Coronation Street's Emily, or comedian Des, but for one morning we were lifted above the mundanities of celebrity gossip to something more elegant - poetry. Everybody was banking on Elizabeth Bishop to come up. Even the bus driver.

And come up she did! Wasn't I the happy girl. I was able to talk about her moving poem, The Fish, from my point of view of a recent victim of angling.

Like Bishop, my childhood has been full of uncertainty - when will mum get back from Aldi and cook my dinner?

I was a little sorry that I didn't get to write my essay about the disappearing charms of country living on paper 1. It was to be my personal tribute to life on the farm. However, after all the navel gazing I've done to write this diary, I really couldn't resist writing an essay about my navel.

So I wrote an essay about the stress of being a student. Yesterday I wrote an article on the same topic. Now I am writing another. I am the media feeding my own frenzy. I'll read this piece over breakfast tomorrow and send myself into a tailspin.

I couldn't agree less with the Taoiseach's contention that rote learning is bad for students. Especially since I am banking on writing a learned-by-heart essay for tomorrow's Irish exam. There's no way I'd ever be able to come up with one on the spot.

I was amused to read in today's English Paper 1 that so many books we believe to have been written by our heroes are in fact written by unknown ghost writers with little or no personal attachment to their subjects.

Tomorrow I will be writing an essay ghost-written for me by some egghead who can comfortably use terms like sceimhlitheoireacht (terrorism) and have an opinion about it in Irish.

If my Irish teacher gets to read this before I get into the exam hall, the essay might be written by an actual ghost - the student formerly known as Elaine.

Elaine Black is a student at Sligo Grammar School