Today is GCSE Results Day

Just took Jake in to collect his GCSE results. Here’s how he did:

A – English
A – Science
B – History
B – Additional Science
C – Mathematics
C – Art & Design
C – English Literature
C – German

He didn’t get his ICT result – which is a BTEC course, and that comes out later on in the year, but he has already heard about his Music BTEC, for which he got two A’s. So that’s pretty cool. By my count, that’s four A’s and two B’s confirmed.

I don’t think the results have quite sunk in for him yet. The thing he’s most pleased about is that he’s finished with his old school and that he’s off to a new school in September.

But more important things are afoot. He’s dumped his results at home, grabbed his skateboard and headed off into town to hang out with his friends. Tomorrow we’re off to Shambala, so we can enjoy this last bit of school holidays hanging at a music festival, not worrying about exam results.

Very proud, of course.

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Magic in the dining room

Jake summons his minions to lay waste to Hannah’s troops

For some reason, after about a five year hiatus, Jake suddenly went digging through our never-unpacked boxes of stuff from New Zealand for his Magic The Gathering cards.

He and I used to play and collect a long time ago and he’s got the bug again. Fortunately, we’d hung onto them.

We have thousands. I’m not exaggerating either. Thousands. Which is just as well, because half the fun is assembling the decks. You stack your deck with combinations of creatures and spells that you think will work together well in a particular strategic way to crush your opponent. And when it all goes wrong, you go back to the drawing board and re-tweak your deck, adding and removing cards.

The 100 albums I carry around with me

This is what your iTunes library looks like when you’re a bit OCD

I don’t have one of those big iPods that can fit tens of thousands of tunes on them. I have a little clip-on one that can take about 200 songs, a larger one that can take about 50 albums – and now I have my iPhone, which can comfortably carry 100 albums.

And 100 is one of those numbers that you just have to make lists out of. Take it from me. I’m one of those people who like lists of things. And I know for a fact that there are at least several people reading this who also like lists – and, like me, enjoy looking through other people’s records and books.

So – I’m going to list them (they’re all full, commercially-available albums – no partial albums or single tracks) for no other reason than I happen to have them handy. If you’re not fascinated by lists, there’s probably nothing interesting to look at here. And before you point out the obvious… yes – there’s hardly any jazz in the list at all, because that’s not really what I feel like listening to at the moment.

Of course, some people will make comments pointing out that album X by artist B is better than their Y album I’ve chosen – or will want to know “Why on earth would you listen to that dreadful band Q?”, but that’s kind of the point. Let’s have a conversation about pop music.