"and every song, every single song on that tape, said exactly the same thing"

...why don't our parents worry about us?
...why don't our parents worry about us?

This is THE mixtape. The mixtape I received when I was 11 from a colleague of my dads I mentioned I liked Nirvana to, and a few weeks later she presented me with this tape, which has arguably formed my entire music taste from then to the present day. Not entirely conciously - I discovered this while we were going through the neglected dusty tape boxes today, having not listened to it for about 5 years, but the key elements are there: Nick Cave, My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division are all artists I enjoy now, whereas back then it was Muse and The Pixies that struck me the most.

It was like finding an old friend hiding in the cupboard...

sweetness, i was only joking

"the brainium contains the brain"

It's exam season again, and everybody is gearing up to do alot of the above in the coming weeks. I should be feeling like this is the end of the line, that all my secondary schooling has led up to this one moment - but somehow, I'm feeling strangely apathetic towards it. This is the fourth year in a row where I've had supposedly 'important' exams (year 9 SATs, GCSEs, AS) and now that they really are important I just don't have the will to worry about them any more. British students are apparantly the most tested in the world, and spend more of their youth at school than most kids in Europe and the US. People my age had their first national SATs tests in year 2 at the age of 6 or 7, which was already their third year at school. French and German children don't even start school until that age! From the age of 4 to 18, we're subjected to an intellect-crushing national curriculum that focuses entirely on making us into reliable little government-boosting exam-robots, ready to tick the boxes that need ticking and not much else. In reality, exams don't tell you anything apart from who is good at doing exams.