I had an exam yesterday afternoon at 2pm. It’s the first year they run the course so we didn’t have any past exam papers to look at. However the lecturer gave us an old masters exam which he said was pretty much the same content. I looked at that and saw that I could do pretty much all of it straight off. So I spent the day before the exam not doing very much. I planned to get up early and do a bit more revision before the exam so I set my alarm for 11am.

When the alarm rang I must have just switched it off because the next time I woke up it was 1.45pm.

FUCK! Fuck, fuck, fuck!

I ran around the house like a headless chicken for a few minutes trying to decide what to do (the bus to uni takes about half an hour). In the end I realised I had two choices: taxi or bicycle. I knew I could get into uni in about 15 minutes by bike and I’d never taken a taxi to uni before so I opted for the bike. Trouble is my bike kinda conked out just before christmas – brakes failed, pedals broke, gears messed up and tyres worn to the brink of explosion – and I hadn’t ridden it since. But off I went anyway.

I made it to uni in 8 minutes: a new record despite the incredibly flat tyres. So I locked my bike up outside the entrance only to find a sign on the door saying ‘use other entrance’. By this time I was so out of breath I could hardly walk. I made it round to the other entrance, climbed the stairs to the 4th floor, spent what seemed like ages trying to locate the room to find that they’d only just started the exam.

All’s well that ends well… or is it…

It took a good 5 minutes before I could do anything but pant and another 5 minutes before I stopped shaking enough to actually write anything. Then I could only actually answer one out of the five question on the exam rather than the three we were supposed to do. The fact that I’d forgotten my calculator (which I’ve lost anyway) wasn’t really an issue since I had no idea how to tackle any of the problems anyway. What was slightly more annoying was that my only pen – that I have been using for everything for just over a year – ran out half way through answering the question I could answer. Luckily the kindly invigilator lent me another one.

I had a guess at one of the other questions and then lied that I’d run out of time hence couldn’t answer any more questions. I don’t suppose it will make any difference but with a bit of luck I might scrape a pass.