Pedro

Well there it goes. Seems like only yesterday I was looking forward to the summer holidays and now before I have had the chance to do anything on my list of things to do it's time to head back. And a shite summer it has been too. Not a jot of sunshine and any day now it'll be dark by 4pm. This year I am living in shared flat. 3 of the blokes I am living with are friends of mine. A fourth bloke joined us the other day and he is Spanish. Claims to have been speaking English for three years but to be honest guys and gals it's not going well. I have started doing that thing that Brits do when abroad where they shout and use their hands a lot to make Johnny Foreigner understand...and while I regard myself as a reasonably patient chap it gets a tad infuriating when you have to repeat yourself five or six times and he looks at you each time with disgust and contempt in his eyes as if it's my fault he can't understand me. I was never a big fan of charades. My flatmates are a lot less patient than me. A Welsh lad, a Geordie bloke and an Irish guy (walk into a pub) who each refuse to calm their accents or use of colloquialisms. Spanish lad is often greeted with 'Alright Boyo', 'Howay man' and 'How's yourself there'. Unless I misunderstood he claims to have been playing guitar for seven years but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he meant seven minutes and he's shit at pool. Except for all that he seems like a nice bloke and he is really making the effort to get to know us. I'm certain that by the end of the year he'll be fluent in conversational English. Oh and he also cooks what looks and smells like faeces. I swear to God it stinks the flat out and he has a habit of letting things soak. If he uses a pan, he leaves it to soak, if he uses a bowl or a cup he leaves it to soak, so the kitchen is packed with dishes and pans with water in them. We also discovered the other day that his mother has been living in his room with him for the past week.

TB or not TB

If you are not a regular reader of RollonFriday then you should be. If you are not familiar with the regular poster OneLungAmy then you should be. If you haven't donated a couple of quid to her charity appeal RUNNING FOR TB ALERT..WITH ONE LUNG!!! then you should think about it and then do it...be. It seems that the days of people knocking on your door with a scrappy piece of paper and a chewed up biro asking you to sponsor them are gone. These days you get emailed a link and you need to enter debit card details and stuff. Seems you can't sponsor less than two quid or put down 10p a mile. As a kid I ended up doing a few of those sponsored 'starve yourself for a day so you know how Ethiopians feel' jobbies and can honestly say I probably ended up eating more on those days than on any day of the year. Then you had to find all the people who had sponsored you and get your money from them. Took absolute ages and was a right kerfuffle. I wonder how much money is owed to charities from defaulted sponsorers. I always wondered why I had to starve myself and why you have to do something to get sponsored in the first place. That's probably why you don't see many people raising money for the blind because they don't fancy having to poke their eyes out for the day. A mate had decided to do a sponsored parachute jump and had to raise a certain amount of cash in order to pay for the plane hire and all the stuff that goes with it to jump out of it the first place. Seems a bit silly when the idea is to raise cash but instead loads of it is spunked on something that, let's be honest, he probably always wanted to do anyway. I also read somewhere that charity work can be quite lucrative and down the road from me the most plushest, modern, seemingly well equipped and spacious building belongs to the NSPCC. Seems a bit...uncharitable to me. Of course I am being obtuse and obviously there are people out there who give up a lot of their time and work bloody hard. University starts next week and I get my re-sit result two days later???

Resat

It was a peculiar exam. It was in two sections and the first section had just the one compulsory question and the second section had a choice of four with two to be answered. The compulsory question was the kind of thing I was expecting a 'Dave did this this this this and that and his mate Fred did this and that and got bit by a dog who had been left a house in a will. Advise Dave, Fred and the dog' question, but the question choices in section two were surreal and based on the last thing you would ever expect to come up in an exam and one of the questions required no knowledge of anything related to the subject and could easily be blagged by having just read a few papers or watched the news. Also I was sat in front of an air conditioning unit that had been set to snow. It was effing freezing!