What's going on 'ere, then?

I have a couple of things planned for the blog this week. While not everyone has Christmas decorations, pretty much everyone has spare pieces of polystyrene packaging, so look out for a terrain tutorial on making asteroid fields. I have been a bit slow playing more battles with my brother for totally non-gaming-related reason. In fact, I'm being a bit slapdash in many of my commitments at the minute. The reason is that mid-October sees the opening of the period during which one can apply to become a teacher. When you apply to become a teacher you need to find all your old exam certificates - for mindlessly bureaucratic reasons in some cases. Don't get me wrong: I can quite see why they'd want you to have done a related degree, so you don't try to go from doing a BA in Windsurfing Science to teaching GCSE English. Given that they want you to have heard of Shakespeare and quadratic equations, I can see why they would want you to have proof of your GCSEs. I'm just not sure why they need to have your A-levels. Can you guess which are the only exam certificates I can't find?

Ominously, the GCSEs and BA were in the same file, buried at the bottom of a box containing insurance details for several old cars. Yet the A-levels were absent. My saintly brother had secreted my MA certificate behind his PC, as he rightly assumed I'd lose it otherwise. So I have been turning the house upside down in a crazy search for these pointless papers. Frankly, my A-levels were awful, anyway. You wouldn't pretend to have the grades I got any more than you would visit the doctor and pretend to have syphilis. Fortunately, Clearing led me to the wonderful and wonderfully quirky Lampeter, once part of the University of Wales and now amalgamated with a college from Carmarthen or something? I've not been back to the old alma mater in a few years. I had a superb student:teacher ratio on my BA. I was literally the only student in the university taking some of the modules. I'm a fairly self-disciplined type, but even without that, I fancy that lecturers would have noticed had class attendance dropped or risen 100% from week to week.

So there's the problem: I am being responsible in seeking out pieces of paper that I haven't seen since 1999, which is rather getting in the way of modelling and gaming time at the minute. I am doing it in a good cause, and one which will lead to me having more money to spend on vitally important things like Klingon Battlecruisers and the like. Bear with us, folk, during this period of technical difficulties.