Yes!

I am overly excited I have just received the news that I have a mini-pupillage with a good criminal set in London! Really excited!

I'm now thinking about how good I'll look in a wig! (ok it's my first mini-pupillage and i've taken the news as if I had secured pupillage)

Woop!

Exam Stress and Band Review

Courtesy of the BBC I now know how to deal with exam stress! Eat lots of fruit, regular exercise la la la. Didn't mention that smoking a pack a day probably also causes more stress and a heavier reliance on nicotine, it is only CBBC Newsround so aimed at kids, and I generally tend to forget that you can't buy cigarettes if you aren't 18, so I assumed generally that people taking their SATS would already have picked up the habit. Newsround takes a very nice childlike view whilst child line seems to think that people will commit suicide through exam stress.. (ok maybe at Oxford)

Also (Law Actually avert your eyes now I mention.. facebook) if you are on facebook and you are at despair with the world then join the group "I've thought about dropping out of law school at least ten times today" It's really f'ing funny, and it shows that most if not all people are practically in the same boat as you. (Pics of Despair - it's always darkest just before it goes pitch black and Mistakes - it could be the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others are featured in their photo gallery)

Enough of exam boredom lets talk about music!
So here are my current fav tracks, if you are so inclined to listen to them.

Review of LLLS's top bands
Foals - good band you might of heard in Skins (yes Skins just generally pinch the best music, check out their myspace and play cassisus or balloons)
Scanners bit like a british version of the yeah yeah yeahs.. check out lowlife
Hercules and Love Affair good tunes, which nearly all feature my favourite singer of all time Antony Hegarty who is the front of Antony and The Johnsons (no good songs though on his myspace page first two albums are superb though, if you are into drinking a bottle of wine by yourself and having a pack of cigs)
The Rumble Strips - from the E4 Advert Check out Girls and Boys in Love.

Crystal Castles - for something completely different/electro/thrash check out Crimewave saw them live at Push@Astoria and they had a really good set.

and finally
The Strokes (not new but as as I am currently trying to beat their song reptilia on medium on guitar hero and my small pinky finger won't stretch to blue! Plus the solo is hard!

Here endeth the review.

A new thought.

Keeping up with my English heritage I have truely decided that a cup of tea solves everything (possibly except imminent failure of exams) Work has been slow, really slow. I'm a week behind, and that's not very good when I don't have an extra week to schedule everything that I planned to do. Oh well as they say down the pony club Tally Ho! Why are there always students who look back on the year of education that has cost them £3,000 and say "why didn't I do more work" the reason being that you were probably having such a good time, that the possiblity of not getting a 2:1 in your exams seemed a very distant thought indeed. Not to mention the impossibility of getting a pupillage after that! So I'm a week behind with no back up plan except to do all the work.


I have also suddenly realised that Admin law is perhaps the most inconvenient law of all as there are NO good textbooks on the subject matter! Which means painfully I have to look to the dreaded De Smith, where a chapter is around 60 pages! Hark woe is me. Luckily all my other courses apart from Criminology(shiver) can all be learnt from one coherent text book!(Praise be Hudsons "Equity and Trusts"and L&O's "Tort Text and Materials"!





Coming soon - an interesting post about mooting and how to do well in it (obviously not following my earlier example but what I've learnt from watching my fellow peers mooting infront of a Law Lord.)

P.s Like the pictures or perhaps too much?

Tomorrow

Tomorrow or today as it is marks the start of the examination period. I'm a bit nervous/shit scared. I have worked out that I have 8 days revision/actually doing the work per each 5 of my exams, so it is going to be quite tight. Exams are a nerve wrecking time, people vomit, pass out under stress, and all your work comes down to 3 hours of an exam, in which you are supposed to write about 4 pages per question, 4 questions = 16 pages give or take. Not a lot considering you may have 20 pages of notes per topic ( a rare occasion but if I have done the work then I normally do have that amount) Then there is picking the topics and hoping that they do come up, question spoting (which is apparently never a good thing to do) either redoing the whole topic because you have no idea of what your notes actually mean, then if your exams are closed book you actually have to learn everything you have written down which can be an imense task in itself. Does anyone have a tip for examinations?

In accordance with examinations comes the dreaded exam result day when everyone really just wants to know if they have beaten other people and as law is so highly and boringly competitive, you get those who boast and those who are your mates and are quite shy about revealing their exam results.

What really does annoy me about exams and how they make up your grade of your degree is that no-one really knows or wants to tell us how are degrees are marked. There are various ways to do it of course and average of what you have done over the two marked years, or the four best marks over the period of two years (withstanding the fact that you have similarily consistent marks a 2:1 for example can be obtained if you have a mixture of 2:1's and 2:2's but if you were to get 4 3rd's in your 2nd year and then four 2:1's in your final year then the likelyhood of getting a 2:1 is unlikely)

So tomorrow dawns a new day for me perhaps because I actually will have to start doing the work at an alarming rate. And doing work constantly for the next 40 days isnt going to be appealing or attractive. Thoughts of exams are depressing and currently turn my stomach...

Good luck to all of you that have exams! I know that I'll need it, or by some divine intervention and hard work I can hopefully get some 2:1s this year :)

Bored

I've been ill recently so haven't posted. I haven't even been able to drink, thats how poorly I am.
All better now that I've taken the meds, and have slept with a hot wheat sack, that smells of lavender. I really really do need a big big vodka and pineapple. Actually my choice is a double vodka with soda and lime, or a bottle of wine to get me off my tits.

I've been slightly bored recently, it seems all so trendy to have a law blog. Where are the other law blags that have a sense of failure, direct language that oh may sometimes involve swearing, admitting that you've gone out and done a big bender. A blag even of a student, doing stupid shit not trying to perfect themselves. I'm just finding it incredibly difficult to deal with a lot of bullshit that perhaps I write myself, and that I pick up from every other law fucker out there that just wants something to put on their CV rather than just say how it is. (note - if i didn't like your law blog I wouldn't read it and have it listed, apart from Mr P who doesn't have a blog, but prefers to piss everyone off - loveable or perhaps not - just a mention Mr P - booze booze booze, I drink it through my rectum! Still here ;)

Then there is the apprentice with Nick the prick. A toff, who was actually quite good at art, who failed to stand up for himself infront of big working class twat Alex, who seemed to have all the women swooning as well as his mate blender face. Why wasn't Alex fired? He was a weak team leader, wouldn't have noticed if the rest of the team swapped the fish for a black hair stall. Regional sales manager my cock.

End of rant.

The Weather

In memorandum of Pops - delightful hamster, queen of her castle, greedy and idle like most lawyers should be. Although she lived out her last days as a vicious, blood drawing rodent, she shall be fondly remembered for her obesity, and repeatedly pissing on my hand.

Anyone enjoying the weather? A quintessentially British topic of conversation obviously.
But due to the weather two lectures for today and tomorrow have been cancelled! (not that I had any plans to go to them, as they normally throw me off what I have actually been studying as lecturers are so far forward of what I need to be studying for tutorials.

As I walked out of my ghetto chick high rise maisonette, I did see a little pitter patter of rain, but decided to go for it, only for it to turn into a full scale piss down, and after ten minutes of walking in the rain I decided to turn back and not go into university or do any work for the day, as the depression of the rain had taken hold of me(also due to the fact that I was soo wet all my clothes had become skin tight)

Interesting week perhaps this week, an inaugural lecture by my favourite lecturer and a trip to a crown court that the bar society have organised. The Bar society sent out emails and even provided a hand out for the occasion of how we should act whilst sitting in on trials. Such key pieces of advice like "do not run round the courts" and "switch mobile phones off" otherwise there could be disciplinary action such as expulsion from the society! (I'm sure this would reflect very badly on a pupillage application) Other key pieces of updated advice are that we are not to stare at witnesses or the accused, (why shouldn't I be able to stare at a witness or the accused and look menacingly at them and give them scornful faces? or even looks like "I know you did it") All these rules and regulations obviously imposed by the criminal lecturer who is organising the event, in case the bar society's members happen to be cannibalistic animals in heat, that wish to disrupt justice by answering their phones in court, and running around in open court happy slapping the judge (yawn). Also have missed a few opportunities to claim my "membership" card, and am being urged to collect it for without it I shan't be allowed into Court.. (thought anyone could walk into courts?)

Additional problems this week may be caused by the bi-weekly seminars, this unfortunate organising of events had lead me to have 3 x 1.5hr tutorials and 1 x 1 hr tutorial on the same week, and seeming as I spend most of my first week that is free of seminars thinking that I have a lot of time to do the work and find a way to distract myself from it, this week could prove to be difficult (like every second week since the beginning of term.)

Depression is also looming because exams are near. Friends and I are thinking of ways to get ourselves out of them such as throwing ourselves in front of a car or bus ( deemed to hazardous and potentially life threatening to be carried out) other suggestions are pregnancy( damn my biological factor of being a male) or somehow burning our hands so that we can't write. None of which will be carried out, however what is most likely is spending a period of 24-30 hours before an exam staying up, drinking red bull and trying to study an entire years worth of topic in that short space. I am not obviously an ideal student, in many respects.

24/7

Dear Blog Watchers,
I am currently enjoying/hating the new 24/7 library system that is now in place. Yes that's right folks, unlimited access to the library 24 hours 7 days a week. Whilst I realise this is a good thing, it does have its negative associations, for example, when you are at home and think that you do not wish to research a tiresome essay that was due in for last Friday, one could just simply hop from one's desk to one's bed. In the library however there seems to be a lack of beds available, therefore forcing me to research and write about whether positivist criminology served the powerful in society to look down on the dangerous classes. Whilst interesting(obviously as the amount of books that are dedicated to the subject are vast and numerous) it is inherently complicated as I try to work out a structure for the essay that was supposed to be in last Friday. Joy.

It is also the time of the year where one has to choose one's options, now as I have practically decided foolishly that I will attempt to enter into the realm of criminal advocacy, I see little point in studying anything else. Perhaps instead I should attempt to keep my options open, perhaps commercial law, company law, competition law or even law&globalisation may pick my fancy. If they weren't so inherently boring and dull. I could study Sentencing and penal policy, however after studying criminology this year, I have found that its a lot of "your own research" into building up various folders per each topic (which I have only just started to do for crimo) and would prefer to just stick to something where there was one textbook and then you went and read the law reports, perhaps childish of me, but "do your own reasearch" does tend to lead me into the confused side of things.

What else is on the agenda? Apart from 24/7 library access (with no beds) and options to think about, I also have to try and sleep sometime, which as most other students will know is a procedural impossibility due to the FEAR of exams. The examination period whilst not being immediately upon me will probably kick me in the face before I know it. Therefore a lot of time shall be spent on actually doing the work that I was supposed to this year, and in some cases redoing it when I didn't do it correctly in the first place. For all of you that have already started to take pro-plus and drink copious amounts of red bull, I feel for you..

Also relating to the flatmate problem, 6 people have come to see the room, which is big enough to probably fit an ant colony in, and only 1 person was actually interested. The problem however being was that the 1 person who actually interested forgot to tell me that she urgently needed to move in over the weekend, and when I contacted her on Monday to see if she was still up for meeting the other flatmate, she told me she had already found a place to live. So back to gumtree it is then.