EXAM DIARY:BACK IN the days when Leaving Certificate papers were written on tablets of stone and social networking was otherwise known as Mass, the exam postmortem was a more exclusive activity. You found out what your best friend thought and then went home to a sing-song and a hunk of soda bread for supper.
Nowadays, you get to chew over the day’s paper with hundreds of online friends bombarding you with status reports of how awful things were today and how much worse they will be tomorrow. I should have known better than to go online after English Paper 1 yesterday and invite the sorrows of the world into my room.
On Facebook, opinions were divided. Some felt the paper was a little too mysterious. The theme of tension and suspense had been taken perhaps too far when it left students afraid to turn the page.
It wasn’t all bad. The comprehension and the “B” questions were fair enough – in fact, everything was fine until I turned the page to the essay titles, whereupon my heart sank.
The short story, my favourite type of composition, was alas not an option for me in yesterday’s exam. “Write a short story in which a mystery is solved.” Publishers advance small fortunes to people who can write good mysteries. Attempting the tricky genre for the first time in my Leaving Cert English exam would have been ludicrous, so I opted instead for the modern fairytale, even though not entirely sure what that involved.
Afterwards, I sought out my English teacher to validate my choice. He did. He’s nice that way.
Back on the web, people were playing poetry roulette again. They’ve been adding Eavan Boland, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson as Facebook friends, depending on their predictions.
You’d think they would have learned something from last year’s Great Boland Swindle. Even bookmaker Paddy Power refused to give odds on the poets this year. So I turned to consult Sox, my cat.
As Lara Marlowe of The Irish Timeswas quoted in yesterday's exam as saying, cats have much to offer when it comes to art and literature. She quoted Ulick O'Connor's translation of Baudelaire: "He returns my gaze, careless what I discover/ And what do I find there, I find myself."
I found myself staring into a cat’s eyes, looking for inspiration about the questions in today’s English paper. Even if Sox knew the answer, how could a cat communicate it?
It was an improvement on Sunday, which I spent assaulting inanimate objects. On Tuesday, I was leaping around like a gazelle, singing themes from musicals. Yesterday: cat’s-eye divination. Today, I might be spotted strolling around the locality in a swimsuit and a Santa hat. Whatever gets you through the Leaving, right?
Carin Hunt is a student at Wesley College, Dublin
