Bang! and the Irish Oral has been aced!

I did my Irish Oral today, and I’m absolutely delighted with myself. It really couldn’t have been better! Seriously, it was amazing, to say the least! I’m amazing. Amazing.
At the end of the exam, when the tape was switched off, the examiner asked me if I speak Irish at home or went to a Gaelscoil before I came to my current school as a repeat. The answer to both was no- I don’t think I’ve ever even switched on TG4 to be honest- which seemed to impress her all the more. “Ach, tá tú líofa go fóill!” Basically, I charmed the pants off the woman- who could blame her for falling into the Jennie-trap. I guess I am quite pleasant. Quite lovely.  Quite amazing.

So anyway, I was asked (or brought up in some cases) absolutely everything I could’ve been asked.
The Health System, Education System, The Points System, The Transport System, the Irish language,  Tourism, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, unemployment, the recession, politics- everything! Apart from the basics of course. Hobbies? Nope. Why I’m blatantly female yet attending an all boy’s school? Nothing.

But these lovely topics were not just in passing, not just in vague detail- the health system, for example, was a perfect recital of 2 A4 pages of wonderful stuff  I wrote up last week. All about investments and waiting lists and administration and-oh- it was marvellous. Well delivered too, I might add, none of that “am, eh, like, tá, much?” crap some people come out with. If the medicine thing doesn’t work out for me I should consider some sort of stage-related course. I displayed genuine (well, fake) emotion and all. “Action is called for immediately- for the benefit of lives” *Insert stern facial expression here*. Bang!

Also, her appreciative facial expression when I went on about the recession- well, that was heart-warming. “The Celtic Tiger retreated back into the Arabic Mist from which he once appeared”, apparently. Oh, she liked that one.

I used the conditional tense constantly… and every other tense going, including the bad oul’ subjunctive. Nobody’s even aware of the fact that there’s one of those in Irish, but the examiners grin and slight nod said it all.

Lucky woman, my examiner. I noticed she had to change her pants after that oral.

I think it went well anyway, something which I gladly celebrated with some ice cream afterwards.
I was so nervous beforehand that my hands started to turn purple (Yes, we all have our individual responses). I downed pretty much an entire bottle of Bach’s rescue remedy- which contains a fair bit of alcohol. I walked into that oral reeking of a whiskey-like beverage, swaying from side to side and laughing uncontrollably at the patterns on the carpet. Well, not really. I’m pretty sure I was indeed reeking of alcohol though.

Sitting in the career’s library in the build up to it didn’t exactly help- my fellow 6th years who were also waiting to be led into the oral rooms of doom felt it more important to discuss methods of doing the worst oral possible instead of letting me do some last minute cramming:
“Just answer everything by saying capaill”
“Feet up on the desk, bag’a cans. Few smokes. She’ll love it”.

My French oral’s on Wednesday. I’m not looking forward to it in the least. I pwn at Irish, but me and French shall never be friends. And the 71% I got in my mock Oral doesn’t exactly fill me with hope either. Eugh.
It literally can’t be worse than last year’s attempt. As I mentioned in previous posts, the examiner was far from lovely last year- and after I told her I do threesomes with my mother, by mistake, (I’d like to point out that I engage in no acts of a sexual nature with my mother- unfortunately the term for threesome is all too similar to the word for “housework”) well, it all went downhill from there.
It looks like I best get off this beautiful, wonderful, distracting internet and stick the head into the French books.
Not tonight though, the Skins finale’s in half an hour… I have my priorities.