Please don't take this as boasting...

...but I am very, very happy and excited after receiving the following letter from King's School today (apparently I was supposed to get it with my other results, but somehow they managed to lose it!) :

Dear Esther
I am very pleased to tell you that you are amongst the group of candidates who scored one of the top five marks in French Specification A this summer. There were 138508 candidates for the examination so this is an exceptional result.
May I congratulate you on such an outstanding achievement and wish you every success with your future studies.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Cresswell
Director General

How amazing is that?!?!? I'm quite hyper at the moment. Wow. Please don't think I'm showing off but I really had to write this, I'm so shocked! Very unexpected. Wow again. I really am in shock!!!

English Residential

For the last two days I've been in Stratford-upon-Avon on my English residential. We stayed in the Youth Hostel and did activities based around our texts, as well as visiting the theatre in the evening.
Yesterday we worked on our Shakespeare, as well as doing warm up games like charades. We had to produce mini-versions of our plays, which was quite fun. There were 4 versions of Twelfth Night, but our group is doing Henry V - which was good because it meant everyone preferred ours as they were sick of the other!
In the evening we went out to the theatre to watch As You Like It, which was brilliant. I'd never seen it on stage before so really enjoyed it, and the girl who played Rosalind was excellent. It was vaguely confusing in the fact that one guy played both the Dukes, and only showed the difference by taking off his coat, but once you'd figured it out it was easy enough!
Then followed an interesting episode where on the way home, our teacher got bored and drove us round a roundabout about 20 times - I kid you not - just for the sake of it. Our English group was in a minibus, but everyone else was on a coach. So after having driven round this roundabout for about 5 minutes, we drove off to try and find a chippy, but failed and so had to go back!
Our beds were less than comfy, and creaked every time you moved a muscle, which isn't good when you're as fidgety as I am! But hey, I survived. I was actually really worried about the accommodation, because I have an insane fear of Youth Hostels after having been told lots of horror stories once when I was about 8. It was perfectly adequate, but everything still felt dirty and slightly unsecure to me!
Today wasn't quite as fun as yesterday; we just did work on our modern novel (Spies by Michael Frayn). It was still better than school though! And over the course of the two days I've met lots more people, and got to know other people far better, which to be honest was for me the main reason for going. So a success! Although I'm exhausted, having not slept Sunday night either, but there we go.
I'm just going to collapse this evening!
And that's all my news, exciting life that I lead.

What on earth have you done to Mr Darcy?

That's by far the best line in the whole film, I reckon.
Well, Pride and Prejudice was better than I'd expected! Keira still wasn't brilliant in my opinion, and didn't pull off the razor sharp Lizzie wit thing very well at all, but there was nothing wrong with her performance and she didn't make the film terrible. Matthew MacFayden (or something like that) was good as Darcy, I liked him, even if he did have a tendency to talk very fast or mumble in important scenes! The first half was a bit slow but the second half was far better. There were some very odd parts, for instance when the screen randomly went flickery orangey red for no apparent reason, for about 5 seconds, then Lizzie woke up. Hmm. By far the worst moment was during a dance, when I think the director was trying to show that for a moment it seemed like they were the only people in the room, and so took away all the other dancers. What actually happened, was we all sat there going, "Hey! All the people disappeared! Where did they go?" So not very successful really. I was disappointed that they didn't have the double wedding scene at the end - in fact it ended with Mr Bennett laughing maniacally - but overall I enjoyed it, and will probably buy it when it comes out on DVD.
There was lovely scenery and a brilliant musical score, so you could go just for that if you wanted to! We got free posters as well :)

Apart from that I haven't been doing much save school. Sunday was fun, celebration then looking after gorgeous little Townsend kiddies while Neil and Dee talked to mum and dad, although it did mean that homework was once again pushed to the side.
School is generally good at the moment, although it can still be daunting at times. I got a locker yesterday which means I don't have to lug my dictionaries around anymore. My back was actually starting to continually ache so it's a very good thing.
I usually finish at one o'clock on Tuesdays, but today we found out at about 11 o'clock - completely by accident, no one had actually told us until someone just happened to ask - that they were swapping our timetable around so lunch would be earlier and I wouldn't finish till 2. I wouldn't have minded this at all if it wasn't for the fact that they hadn't even bothered to tell us, which was really aggravating, especially as I was going to use this afternoon to do homework. So anyway, at 2 it didn't seem worth wasting money on the bus so I went to King's and helped with Yrs 7 and 8 hockey; great fun! We did reverse stick today :)
So I'm trying to psyche myself up into doing some work right now but failing, I guess it will just have to wait till after tea...

Not much to report

Well, Henry Box is much improved and this week has been fun (at times) but still very, very tiring!I am exhausted but relatively happy. However I still feel like a total idiot in all the language lessons because of ridiculously amazing people that also do them, which is not very helpful! But anyway. At least I knew what warfare was in history!!!So I'm not doing much this weekend, apart from going to see the new version of Pride and Prejudice with Harriet tomorrow. To be honest I'm not very hopeful, especially when it comes to Keira Knightley, but I can't not watch it so there we go! She just isn't very good - at all really, but especially at witty lines (as is demonstrated with the very odd 'you like pain - try wearing a corset!' line in Pirates of the Caribbean which sits completely differently to the rest of the humour and comes out oddly anyway). So you know, it could be dreadful, but I'll let everyone know tomorrow!
Apart from that nothing else much is happening - I am cold and ill, but that's not particularly exciting.
Oh, I know what I can say - I've got some photos from my China trip on Flickr now; if you want to check them out my user name is EstiBesti.
Have fun!
xxx

Slightly more hope

Today was so much better than yesterday or Monday. Both those days I came home wanting to escape to some other continent, but today was quite good.
I had frees until 10:45, and they're so much worse than lessons because you just sit around on your own in the sixth form block being looked at weirdly by lots of people who won't talk to you. So today I escaped into Witney until about 10:20 when I came back, but luckily there were only about 5 people in the room I went into and I'd met some of them before. They were really nice and actually talked to me (especially after in my freakish organisation I could provide a necessary stapler), which was cool. It was also good because a couple of them were in my German class so I could tag along when they went and not get lost again :)
The only lessons I had today were German, one before lunch and one after. Both the teachers are so nice, which is brilliant, escpecially as German is the lesson in which I'm completely on my own with no King's people, and also it's probably the subject I'm weakest in. So hooray! Our German grammar teacher did Lemony Snicket with us in German, which I think was a stroke of genius. Then we played Countdown and Blind Date in our oral lesson. Fun all round!
Anyway I'm absolutely exhausted - starting a new school is so draining! - so I'm going to go off and relax and do nothing for a bit. Sounds good to me.
xxx

That place is far too big!

I got lost about 7 times today - trying to find my room for registration, trying to find my English lesson, trying to find my German lesson - that was the worst because I was on my own, and I looked around at all the buildings realising that I didn't have a clue which one to go in, turn one way and there are hordes of scary little people in uniform surging towards me, turn the other way and there's more of them... I was so panicking until I saw someone that I knew and sprinted towards them!
At lunchtime no one was really talking to us so we escaped and hid in Witney. It's not that it's not good, but it is very very daunting, and there's only so much you can take in one day!
My German lesson was cool though, the teacher was really sweet, and our English teacher is lovely as well. I wasn't quite so enamoured with the French lesson - unusual for me - but hopefully it'll improve.
Oh, and I have to buy a £25 collins robert french dictionary for some ridiculous reason - if anyone has a spare they don't want please let me know!!
Anyway, fingers crossed for tomorrow - luckily my lessons finish at lunch so I can come home then. Although lunch is at ten past one, which is ridiculously late compared to King's lunchbreak of quarter to twelve! I'm starving by the time we get there!
But I've been a good girl and done all the homework I was set today, so we'll just have to see how we get on from here...but you have no idea how much I want to go back to King's right now!

New School

Well it was my first day at Henry Box today.
It was fun and everyone was really nice and friendly, so that was good. A lot of the admin stuff was quite confusing - and I'm convinced I'm going to get lost straightaway (anyone who knows me well can imagine that!) - but it did seem like a good school. Apparently of 300 ish A Levels exams taken last year only 2 were failures. Which is very impressive!
Most people were really friendly to us, which was really nice as I was so nervous you would not believe and really needed someone to take me round! I had a complete panic attack last night! But as I said, people were really nice and we tagged along with a bunch of girls from our form all day. They very thoughtfully put all the ex-King's people together, which is really nice - it's good to know at least someone!
Everyone was shocked when they found out how small King's is. We worked out that our whole school, primary and secondary combined, is less than their 6th form. e had 220 pupils, they have 240. Wow.
So I think I'm going to be shocked on Monday, when the rest of the school starts back - there's about 1200 I think! Aah!
Anyway I have to go, I'll hopefully start writing on this again after another long summer absence, so watch this space!
xxx