Musings of a Perfectionist

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

Hey everyone! I've been thrown a bit by the new Blogger update - it looks fancy and actually like something that belongs in this decade (or even the 2010s... shock horror) but it's weird . I'm really hoping that my formatting isn't messed with but sorry if it is. (Edited note: the picture uploading was always pretty bad but now it's worse?!? I didn't realise that this was possible but just go with it.) I've been doing some crafts recently - something to do with all of this free time (around lessons) I'm having all of a sudden - and thought that I'd use my blog to share some of it, as and when I complete it. Especially if I write it up as CAS, along with this blog.  The most recent thing that I've done is a little cross stitch (as can be seen below) of some owls in a tree. I did it because we had to do something that was new and that was a challenge for Rangers and I had been putting it off for ages because I didn't think that I'd be any g...

Yep! I actually won NaNo again - the last time I did this, I was in Year 10 and it was November. Since then, I've participated in the November 50,000 words one every year and have not won, and also have participated in the Camp NaNo (every April and June) where any target is acceptable, and not really won any of those (not really because sometimes I've just changed the goal a lot which is fine but it feels a bit like cheating to me). But this beautiful month of April, I have managed to write 50,000 words for a story in 30 days! This is actually in part due to the quarantine, because I've had more time around school work to write (as I'm not spending what seems like years on the bus) as well as two weeks of the Easter Holidays. But, regardless of the reason, I'm very proud of my achievement! And that's it for today, folks. Have a good day. Do something that makes you proud of yourself. Find the website  here  (and if you're under 18,  this one  is ex...