Goodbye English, for twice or thrice have I loved John Donne

EXAM DIARY: "Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp."SO SAID the lusty old bard John Donne and so say all of us

I certainly had a wild ride through yesterday's English Paper II, not least because it is the last time (hopefully) that I will sit it.

Studying the English syllabus three times over has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my battle to study medicine.

John Donne has always been my favourite poet on the course and I was thrilled to see his name crop up on yesterday's paper.

My favourite poem of all time, The Flea, is etched on my brain along with the course code for medicine in TCD (TR051).

So happy was I at the content of yesterday's paper that I could not stop writing.

Twenty-five pages later they had to prise the booklet from my red-hot hand and boot me out of the exam hall.

"Silence that dreadful bell! How poor are they that have not patience!"

I hollered, to no avail.

I have only one ally here in the exam centre at Wilson's Hospital - one other refugee from Leeson Street let loose in the countryside.We lend each other support, but mine rang a bit hollow yesterday as I skipped like a lamb out the school gates leaving my colleague to her chemical doom.

Poor thing had to do home economics on Wednesday as well, so she's had four exams in the first two days.

I put chemistry in the bag last year and carried the points forward. I narrowly escaped her fate as Mary Hanafin's collateral damage.

If I had chemistry hanging over me yesterday I might have been less maniacal in my preparation for English II.

I think I overdid it, in fact. I had the ingenious idea of recording myself reading out notes and quotes in my best luvvy voice and playing it at night while I slept. By breakfast time yesterday I could have murdered Desdemona myself. I don't recommend Method Studying. As Olivier once told De Niro . . . sometimes acting will do.

This level of passion, combined with my rapidly deteriorating handwriting, should pose a considerable challenge to the reader. My 'H's and 'L's are now hard to differentiate, clief examiner. I lope you hike what I rote.

I've also carried maths forward from last year, so today all I have is geography in the afternoon. It's hardly surprising that my handwriting's not up to 25 pages of non-stop penmanship.

I'm a screenager, after all. The longest script I write is signing for deliveries from eBay.

I suppose there will come a time when Leaving Cert students are perched behind rows of gleaming laptops, leaving their instant-messaging eyelid inserts in a bucket outside the door.

At least the assessment process will then be purged of graphonomism - did you know that some people have an inbuilt distrust of people whose handwriting slopes to the left?

I'm sure I've been robbed of medicine in Trinity on a number of occasions (two) because the examiner didn't like the cut of my nib.

But I rise above it, as Othello says, the robb'd that smiles, steals something from the thief.

Laura Brady is a repeat student at the Institute of Education, Dublin