I'm coughing up yellow gunk.

That will be all.

Remember when Ariel did a deal with Ursula? You give me legs so I can be a human, I'll give you my fab singing voice? And then she rampaged about trying to win over that hot prince Eric with no voice?

Well, apart from the being a mermaid and bargaining with a woman that is half octopus and the hot prince called Eric, I can sympathise with Ariel. I have no voice.

Yes, that's right. It's three days before my first exam and I have laryngitis.

I'm ok, just have a really sore throat and a really bad cough and I can't talk. Which for someone who doesn't stop talking is rather annoying. I mean, I can croak. But it hurts. So then I have to try whispering and nobody can understand and it's all terribly frustrating.

In adition to my vocal chords giving up, my GHDs (the daddy of all hair straighteners) have packed in. And my mobile is also dying.

So all in all, I think life might hate me.

Now that the panic has set in with my first exam exactly one week away, I have been hauling out all of my lecture notes from the past year to see what I can learn about Albert Camus, Louis Malle and Simone de Beauvoir.

After the summer, I'm going to remind myself at the beginning of the year to make my lecture notes at least semi-understandable.

Pages and pages of A4 paper are littered with abreviations which now have no meaning, a spidery scrawl of black ink dancing along the last few lines, trying to take in those few essential words which the lecturer has to say and always keeps for the moment that people start to pack up and leave. "Go back to later" scrawled in margins, names mis-spelled and followed by '?'. Some sheets boast a class title at the top and nothing else, apart from little daisies sprouting along the top line, sometimes accompanied by monochrome rainbows, hills and little houses with four windows, a door and a little swirly trail of smoke from the chimney on the pitched roof. Notes between friends crop up, "does she know her bra's hanging out?", "would he notice if we got up and left?" and the odd "zzzzzz!!" here and there.

As I said. Next year? Tidying up the handwriting, putting a ban on all childish artwork and definitely, definitely paying attention.

Fingers crossed I can make some sense of it all soon.

For now, I'm off to Belfast, with the intention of getting a visa. The English version of Camus' L'Étranger is coming with me. At least I'm trying to make an effort... Right?