BEDA #6 - The Elephant In The Room, The Hole In The Ceiling And The Boy Who Cried Asbestos

I am getting into a habit of posting these after midnight and calling it the BEDA of (technically) the day before. Oh well, it will be a quirk of my BEDA posts. One, I have no doubt, all my millions of readers have come to laugh at with affection most people reserve for elderly relatives.

I want to talk about the big elephant in the room (and by room I mean my life) but I want to start by ranting about my real life. For a change. Because, let's be honest, what's the point of a blog if not to occasionally get angry and feel like you're doing something constructive with it when, in reality, the only people who will read the post will be people who, due to friendship or familial commitments, are predisposed to agree with you?

Anyway, my bathroom ceiling has become a massive saga. We started with a leak coming through our bathroom light fitting, which spread across the ceiling and down the wall. We had one builder, who came in looking like an extra from Dawn of the Dead, and fiddled with the toilet upstairs. But nothing stopped. So someone came and bashed a massive hole in our bathroom ceiling and pointed at a leak. Thanks for that. The insurance company then got funny about doing the work and we've been waiting for days. Meanwhile an electrician has come and switched the fuse off so none of our ceiling lights work. Today, someone came and basically refused to touch anything because it the man upstairs' responsibility (despite the fact they are going to be billing his insurance company) and then, despite the fact it is the least urgent part of the job, offered to take our ceiling down. And then, when he saw some Artex we plastered over years ago, cried asbestos despite the fact no builder we have ever had has mentioned it before.

And now we're back to fiddle-with-the-toilet builder to come back tomorrow to fix the pipe. Thank God I'm going to be out all day at Summer In The City.

Right, elephant in the room before my laptop dies or my dad wakes up (having fallen asleep next to me watching Old Grey Whistle Test footage) from my tapping of keys. The Elephant in the Room is... well, Cambridge. Or it would be the elephant in the room if people abided by my rule of no talking about it which no one has. But anyway, it's there. I've been going over options and e-mailing them and generally getting swept up in the prospect of going there which I've been trying desperately hard not to do.

I know, I know. They wouldn't have given me an offer with the Spanish grade I had if they weren't at least maybe going to let me in without the perfect grades most other people going will undoubtedly have. And, let's be honest here, of all the people who applied to Cambridge, I wanted it the least at the time of sending UCAS off. I thought it silly to pin my hopes on, thought that there were plenty of great universities who had none of the pressure intrinsically connected to Oxbridge. Including Exeter where I would be more than happy to go. It's awesome.

But I have to be honest, with results day only a few weeks away, I am realising that I do want to go. A lot. And maybe my reluctance has less to do with the fact I might not get in (which people, despite your sweet protests to the contrary, is a possibility) and more to do with the fact I'm not sure if I'm enough for it.

I'm not going to be overly-humble now - I know I'm clever. I have a string of exam results to prove to me I'm not stupid and if I get in, a panel of people who look at some of the brightest brains in the world will have decided I am, in fact, good enough.

But there's lots of stuff I don't know that somehow I feel I *should* know. Maybe I'm overestimating Oxbridge undergraduates but a part of me thinks that, to get in, you should be able to spell 'include' without spellcheck (which I can never do) or know when the French Revolution was without looking it up, should know more about The Peasants Revolt and less about Old Grey Whistle Test footage and gay soaps from Germany.

I don't know. I think even if I get in I won't be convinced I am good enough until I graduate and even then I'll do that annoying thing where I talk about 'scraping my result'.

Maybe all this is just fear of going from a big fish in small pond to a small fish in a massive pond full of people who, by a lot of measures, probably know a lot more about my subject than me.

And despite all this, and all my doubts about the grades and the snobbery and antiquated nature of the system, really want to go. I want, essentially, an academic experience from a university before anything else. I want to be stretched beyond my imagination and I want to read until I want to burn every history book in the world.

I want to get in. And even if, on the day, I act nonchalant, I will be very disappointed if I don't.

PS: The title of this post - three of the worst titles for children's books ever?