Posts

Steam trains move slowly but surely

Hello :) Those of you who know me well will probably have listened to at least one rant about feminism, especially after having studied Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez in English. And those of you who have also read this wonderful book will (hopefully) be joining me in ranting. One of the parts of this book discusses women's health and medicine, and how the concept of the default male (a major concept throughout the entire book) prevents women's health issues from being properly understood and treated. There were many parts of the book that made me so angry that I had to put it down and just stare into the distance. It was probably quite a good thing that we were studying it, because it meant that I only had to read a few chapters at a time and so the anger wasn't building up BUT, the revolution is here! Slowly, it comes, like a steam train. One of the parts of the revolution concerns actually listening to and collecting data on women's health so...  Please fil

New updates and new friends (plants)

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 Good morning/afternoon/evening! I'm not even going to guess how long it's been since I last published a post. And then, when I was going to write one today, I remembered that Feedburner (the google system I use to track subscribers and that sends out the emails finding their way into your inbox) is dying so I had to change everything over to another site. The new site is great: it's slick and helpful and so much better than Feedburner (which didn't seem to have been updated since it was first created) BUT it did involve a lot of messing around with HTML codes and playing around with the useless Blogger settings. Hopefully, it is now all sorted out (although I'm still wanting to add the subscribe button to the main home page as well as in the sidebar). Oh, and for subscribers, it should be more of a newsletter system because I had to pay to get the whole sending an email whenever I post - as I don't post much, it shouldn't affect you at all :) Anyway. Moving

Back Again With Some Fun UCAS Advice

Hello and welcome back to another post from my blog - prompted in part by my father asking when there would be another, and also by UCAS reminding me that I was going to write a post about applying to university. So here I am, packed with knowledge about UCAS applications and personal statements and all of that fun stuff, all of which I hopefully still remember. Firstly, I hope that you, dear reader, are keeping fairly well in these times - with lockdown coming back in the next few days, I do hope that you can remain positive and loving and I shall try to write more blog posts to keep you entertained (although as I am still going to school, this may have been an empty promise). Secondly, the reintroduction of lockdown has meant that my driving theory test that was to occur on Friday 6th November has been cancelled (to be rescheduled!) which is highly unfortunate. But I shall endeavour to go out driving with my parents despite no longer being able to have lessons with an instructor. We

I Find Out A Load About The Railway Industry

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Heya friends! I've been up to quite a lot recently (including finishing Draft One of my Maths coursework yesssss) and today, I decided to do some researching about women in the railway industry (to be fair, this is for a challenge badge but also I am interested in female empowerment and the state of equality/lack of in the railway industry is an excellent indication of general equality in Britain). So yeah. I found out a load about the railway industry and now you can too! At the birth of the railway near the beginning of the 19th Century (around the 1830s), the industry was structured in such a way to mirror how society worked. This meant that fathers and sons would follow each other into the industry while the women would become wives and mothers. They were, however, hired by rail companies to work although this work was prohibited to ‘women’s work’ such as cleaning and sewing. They were also able to be level crossing gatekeepers as it could be fitted in with family life - this p

A Rhetorical Question for You Today: What Makes a Good Book?

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Hi, and I'm here again, ready to grace your laptop/phone/other device screens for however long it takes you to read this post! Well, it's been pretty warm recently, hasn't it? Today promises to be warm and then tomorrow... eugh it'll be too hot for me and I won't want to do anything apart from sit on the cold floor in our dining room. But the weather is not a particularly interesting topic (even if I am British) and so, have no fear, I am here to talk about something different. There is actually something interesting that I read in the book I'm currently reading (The Tiger by John Vaillant, because I love tigers and it's been sitting on my shelf for ages and I'm doing this thing where I read all the books on my bookshelves) and I kinda wanted to talk about that BUT I don't really have to attention span at the moment and it probably needs a bit more research/thought than this randomly generated blog post. Also. I'm a bit busy with the whole Maths

I Talk About The IB For A Bit (useful for those who are unsure about post-secondary school or those who are starting the IB in September)

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Hey...so I know that I haven't written anything for ages  and I'm sorry, but in my defence, I haven't been doing anything but sleeping and schoolwork, and also I simply have not been motivated to write a post. Still need to set a little reminder that pops up once a fortnight or so and tells me to publish something. I may get round to that before Christmas. So today's post is inspired by the end of term/the school year and also by the fact that I was messaged by someone asking about the IB - yes, this post is a post about my experiences doing the IB (for the first year, remember) so buckle in and get ready to have the answers to any questions that you didn't even know that you had. Also, if you're nearing the time that you have to start deciding where you want to go after GCSEs or you're starting the IB in September (covid-19 permitting) I would actually recommend reading this - I know that I would have loved to be able to hear the thoughts of someone actuall

Do You Think That Dragons Would Like Campervans?

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Because I haven't actually written anything on my blog for a bit, the modern look threw me once again. Oops? But hello! I hope that everyone is doing okay with everything that's going on at the moment. Our history teacher said that we're living through history at the moment and that it is exciting (especially as a historian) but also terrifying. This came about because we were talking about primary sources and secondary sources and which is more reliable/accurate (because it's history, the answer is neither). If you wrote a diary about the events happening at the moment, is it more or less accurate/reliable than someone thirty years in the future writing about the events drawing from multiple sources? Haha isn't history great. It's fascinating and there are so many different interpretations that can come out of sources, much like English (we're studying Othello at the moment and I did go off on a mini-rant about how I don't like Cassio). Oh, and also I j