Term ends, Kate packs up and scoots off happily to her little paradise where she goes crazy and endeavours to forget such a thing as hard work exists

I FINISHED MY PORTFOLIO!!!!!!!!!!!! Honestly I don't know how I managed it; think I pulled off a super-human feat in finishing it. It took several cans of red bull (geez, how I hate the stuff; tastes like calpol mixed with half a sugar plantation), the constitution of an ox (even if I do say so myself) and mind over matter. Don't think about the whole enormous task, just concentrate on each little word. Being an Oxford student has actually turned me into a machine of sorts. No matter what the hour, how little sleep and how little I've eaten the sentences keep pouring out of me, although I have to dig deep. It never ceases to amaze me, though, that there can still be oil in the lamp of my intellect and powers of expression even though all my other faculties have just about been burned up (excuse the truly awful pun). In true Kate vein though I managed to finish it a full 5 hours before the deadline, then my body came up against a barrier of sorts and I just crashed and slept like a baby for four and a half hours, through all 8 of my alarms (I set them off every 15 minutes after the time I want to wake up, because with me there is just no guaranteeing anything!!) and woke up with precisely half an hour remaining to get dressed, hurl myself out the front door, down the road and into college (maybe 200 yards); print off 2 copies of the essay, get them all in order and slip a treasury tag through them, save my work onto a CD, put it all in an envelope, address the envelope then leg it to the exam schools (another 400 yards maybe). I was amazed I managed to accomplish all this and submit the portfolio a mere six minutes late. I was even more amazed at this given I had a small disaster whilst running out of college involving my carrying the unsealed envelope upside down in my haste and not having got the treasury tag through my 15-page portfolio properly. *Cue massive groan*

I am currently trying not to think about how many marks I will lose for this paper - and I'm sure I will lose some, because when I submitted it over the desk at the exam schools I got this receipt back telling me the date and time to the exact minute that it was received by the examiner. Now why would they bother recording the time if not to check that all the submissions were punctual. I've got a plan all figured out though: if they're petty enough not to give good work the credit it deserves just because it took a smidgen longer than it should've done in coming, I will complain to them that my watch is slower than their clock. This would only be lying by omission as well: my phone generally is 5 minutes slow, although I am aware of this by now and tend to take it into account.

Anyway what am I wittering on about. No point in thinking about that anymore, because I'M HOME!!! I've finally reached my upper healing realm <3 We went zooming off down the motorway with the car so full that if you were to open the doors books, saucepans and duvets would all come spilling out, but it was fun. I'd forgotten, no kidding, what it's actually like to be around people all the time; to live with them and have someone to talk to when you need them, my Oxford life is that cordoned off from other human society. And that sounds stupid, but it's a combination of the workload, having a different (and crammed) schedule to everyone else, living in a house full of foreigners half of whom can't understand you in a town full of snobs that you have little in common with where 2 of the only people you care for and give a damn about you in return are in China. Simple things like being wound up by my brother, having my sister pull my hair, my mum nag me about washing, my dad singing at the top of his voice and sitting around a table for meals instead of at a desk with a bowl in my lap surrounded by a mountain of papers just take on a whole new level of meaning. True I've fallen out horrifically with my mum already because I accidentally squeezed her expensive make-up all over the bathroom floor, but even having somebody to scream at is better than having nobody.