The other day I got a rather out-of-the-blue card from one of my music teachers from school, Mr Orton, who wanted to write and congratulate me on my first. (I didn’t tell him, but my mum has predictably been going round telling everyone she meets, so he probably heard about it from someone. Anyway.) At the same time he also basically acknowledged that a) they never thought I had it in me (‘you must be aware that it came as something of a surprise to us when you announced your intention of doing music at university’), and that b) I’d proven them wrong (‘well, you have shown how right you were in your decision’.) Ha! Numerous harsh one-liners in response to this have since been running through my head - I’m quite tempted to simply send back a postcard with the words ‘IN YOUR FACE!’ scrawled across it - but none of them seem entirely appropriate. After all, he did write to me. Hmm. But I think I might have quite a lot of fun wording my reply, anyway. It’s odd, because although I probably wouldn’t have done music at University if it hadn’t have been for the two music teachers that I had, they certainly didn’t give me much confidence in my own abilities while I was at school.

But aside from that, the interview for Marks and Spencer went ok, and I got a job. Hurrah! (Well, probably.) To be fair, it wasn’t that difficult - there were quite a lot of vacancies going, and I don’t think they were going to be too picky. At the end of my interview, which was simply a series of questions read from a sheet of paper, I was asked to describe an example of a difficult situation that I’d got myself into and out of on my own. And I couldn’t think of anything, so I ended up telling my ‘assessor’ about the time I locked myself out of our house at RHUL and ended up climbing in through my bedroom window. Heh heh heh! I was also asked to go and chat to some random customers in the store about what they were buying, to assess my ‘communication skills’, which was quite amusing. No one wanted to talk to me (assuming, I imagine, that I was doing market research and was going to force them to fill in 15 minutes worth of surveys), until I met an Irish woman who was buying a pair of jeans, who told my assessor that she’d give me 9 out of 10. Maybe that was what swayed it. Anyway, I’ll be working part time in the food section, which will probably mean I’ll end up stacking shelves and swiping cards on the tills. I’ve also got some part time admin work from a couple who live up our road, which will mainly consist of putting data from a whole year’s worth of invoices into the computer. Woohoo. It is going to be an exciting few months…