Thread 17 - TalkLair: "Okay, first of all, what's with the outfit? Live in the now, okay? You look like DeBarge."

[RasaSayangEh]

(Previous thread 16).

Spring is springing, daffodils blooming all over our LairGarden, which have not all been picked by a neighbour's kid...

In the TalkLair, the hearth is glowing, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, cosy rugs are down on the floors looking a bit stained by cat hairball regurgitation. The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch though, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

Good luck to them both @RasaSayangEh!

Good luck twins!

Best of luck to your DDs @RasaSayangEh

I second the sentiments of good luck! What a time, I remember being stressed about my GCSEs and then the results.

At the tender young age of 23!

I am too old for this new fangled GCSE malarkey but I remember O levels mostly for the all pervasive aroma of Ambre Solaire. Exams weren’t until June then and it was 1976.

I hope the DDs did well @RasaSayangEh

I found my Spanish oral easier than my French but was better at French. It's still the same. Spanish is so gloriously phonetic once you know even a little of it. In Madrid my expat friend's friends like to hear me speak because I sound like I'm fluent and I'm so far from it that it's pretty hilarious.

It's funny the things you remember, isn't it? I aced my French oral at A level, thanks to being told that the examiners invariably started off by asking where you were from. And I wasn't local (army brat), which led to other questions. I had prepped a load of vocabulary about my life before moving there and expounded fluently on life in Singapore and Germany and all sorts of shit like that.

The French teacher was sitting at the back of the examiners' platform, beaming at me. Afterwards she hugged me in the corridor (so embarrassing!) and said that oral had probably put me up a grade ... which was a good thing, as my French literature essays (written in English) were invariably mediocre. She was right, too: they were! I have zero interest in writing about books I've read.

I don't really remember GCSE French oral. Fairly basic chat about holdiays and family, I think.

But for A/S level we could choose any topic to prep a short talk, and were then quizzed on it. I'd spent the holiday just before the exam working on a French farm, so was (temporarily) very fluent in some quite specialist agricultural vocab. I'm not sure if examiner was relieved to hear about something different or horrified by the bit on pig castration, but she basically let me ramble and asked very few questions.

Unsurprisingly, 58 years on, I have almost no memory of O-levels as they were then called ... apart from Biology, where the girl sitting at the other end my table fiddled around with specimens A and B in front of her and was faced with the problem of drawing a diagram of the eye structure of a shrimp and giving 3 reasons why a house-fly was not an insect. Ah, Vivien M, where are you now?

I have no recollection of my O-level MFL oral exam but assume I aced it: it was English

We also had an oral exam for Malay language, done by an external examiner in an empty classroom. Our school (colonial building) despite being in the city centre, was on the edge of a massive park/forest reserve, and we would regularly get classroom invasions by troops of long-tailed macaques* wanting to rifle through bags and desks for our snacks/lunchboxes. Anyway. My Malay oral was interrupted by several macaques rattling at the windows trying to get in, which absolutely terrified the examiner but gave me a golden opportunity to discuss said monkey invasions.

*They are fucking scary up close, especially the males with their enormous canine teeth. And they're not afraid of humans, so could be very aggressive. Also educational, because they'd shag rampantly in front of crowds of gawping schoolgirls. Every classroom had a broom or two, for use in warding off the invaders enough that we could evacuate the room.

I also can't remember my O-level science practicals but I do remember part of my Biology A-level mock practical.

We were provided with a biological sample in a small dish and asked to identify it and then discuss the features and their biological relevance. The sample was a piece of chicken trachea, about an inch long. After the mocks, our biology teacher went absolutely ballistic at our year group because a huge number of them had identified the sample as plant xylem. In some ways, perhaps an understandable mistake, as long as (a) you had no idea of the relative sizes of microscopic plant cells vs animal trachea (b) as a biology student you couldn't recognise something that was obviously of animal, not plant origin 🤦🏻‍♀️

I remember my A-Level Geology practical, one question was which mineral never to lick - Cinnibar. Or Mercury Sulphide. Another licky one was the "Is it limestone, or muddy limestone?" You can't see silt with a magnifying glass, but you can feel the grains on your tongue.

Taste test to differentiate between Halite and Sylvite KCl & NaCl) Sylvie is very bitter. There was an arsenic salt as well, which smells of garlic, if struck with iron, or subject to a flame - we all knew licking that was also somewhat frowned upon.

Come Autumn and University, we were told absolutely no licking any more, as all the samples were stored in boxes together and they couldn't be guaranteed not to be contaminated with something diabolical, including Herpes...

I would love to have done Geology A Level - so interesting.

I had some problems with the chemistry A-level practical. One of the 'what is this substance?' tests is 'If I do X, does it produces hydrogen sulphide (a colourless but stinky gas)?'

I can't smell hydrogen sulphide. At all.

But whereas Andrew (colourblind) was allowed a colour spotter for pH indicator changes, 'can't smell hydrogen sulphide' is not a recognised disability. It's not a recognised anything. So I couldn't get any adaptations, and had to go by the proxy method of 'If I do X, does everyone around me pull a disgusted face?'.

Ha! @NoBinturongsHereMate ... that's actually quite a risky thing not to be able to smell, isn't it? The wording of the government guidance on this amused me:

Children will be affected by hydrogen sulphide in the same way as adults, however because hydrogen sulphide is heavier than air and children are shorter than adults, children may be exposed to higher concentrations than adults.

It can be risky, yes - but not in most everyday situations. I try to avoid volcanoes and sewers anyway.

I remember nothing of Chemistry A Level. I’d mentally checked out of it after getting something like 18% in the mock and then discovering that the universities I’d applied to were no more interested in me passing it than I was. I essentially did nothing in Chemistry for about four months but somehow got a C. All very odd.

I did German O level at school in 1966 and have no recollection of either the oral exam or the grade I got, but I did pass it. I did my French O level in a year at night school when I was 28 and was six months pregnant at the time. Of course I prepped all the vocabulary to do with having a baby, and got a small chance to use it when we got to the future tense.

The only thing I remember about French O Level was that one of the written options was to write a story from a series of pictures. Apparently I’m visually illiterate in French because I read a couple in a car stopping to ask directions which aubergine else read as them were being stopped for speeding.

which aubergine else read as them were being stopped for speeding

Aubergine Else would be a great name for a cartoon character.

I don't remember much about my O' levels. My mother had not long been sectioned for schizophrenia and home life had been so chaotic and violent for so long that I hadn't really done any revising. The most meaningful exams I've ever done were in horticulture, in my early forties, which was my big turning point. For some reason I understood and remembered everything that was taught and I aced those exams, not easily done with the RHS. Getting the results after a four month wait was absolutely amazing and I was so excited I felt like I might faint. It was wonderful.

aubergine

Splendid autocarrot!

I was on the BBC front page earlier when the news flashed up that the white smoke had been seen, so switched over to their livestream and went back about 5 minutes to see it. They were just showing the roof and chimney and wittering witlessly (as opposed to - if anyone remembers the term - "Dimbling smoothly") and the absolute highlight for me was the seagulls. There were two adults faffing about and then a fledgling came marching up and harassed them for food. They weren't having any of it. "Bog off, you greedy little tyke!" said the body-language.

It would! Autocorrect is really not my friend at the moment.

I've loved reading memories or oral exams past. Re my French oral, it was about the mountains of Mourne. I think my French teacher - Irish - and I had been talking about me maybe visiting them when I was next in Co Roscommon but being far more likely to visit Croagh Patrick which is in Co. Mayo. Something a little different than the usual answers whilst also managing to be a bit bizarre because ultimately I knew I would not be climbing any mountains and just sitting around eating banana sandwiches and drinking either Irish lemonade or Fanta at lunch and then going here there or over the road to where my older and good love her lovely friend who worked in the boutique and I'd sit and fold and say what clothes I loved and blah. I went home from there in1982 with a large t-shirt that was verging on fashion disaster/total result. It was long enough to go over my bum so I wore it as a short dress but with frilly knickers underneath and nobody had one because it was boutique so not fast fashion at all and it was a huge "Omg where can I get that!?" "A specialist boutique in the West of Ireland. They're very high end and I'm afraid this is probably sold out already. Oh the fun of loving fashion, blagging and getting away with it.