43 days.

Not to create a theme with titles, but at the time of writing this is exactly how long it is until I'm supposed to up sticks to Scotland and start degreeing it up, results willing. And I am bloody terrified.

If I had readers other than those who pester me to write, the previous post might have been a worry - "will I survive Malia?" followed by more than a month of silence. Really, it just boils down to sheer laziness and working a slightly ridiculous amount of hours. Having just got paid, I am ever so slightly in love with my job, but give me a week or two more with my radioactive lemon t-shirt, a lot of foreign students and repetitive strain from data inputting and I'll loathe it again. That said, I remain inordinately proud of the fact I might just be able to pay my way through first year... a major relief considering how much of a miniscule fail my student loan is.

Every few days I keep schitzing out, worrying about my results, September itself, everything really. I'm calming it with mental trips to Ikea for furniture and relentless optimism but it is pushing me to what I now like to think of as 'baking point'. Sadly, having no free time and no caster sugar renders me a bit useless on that front, so I'm largely settling for binge drinking and sleeping as distractions.

I'm a bit rubbish really. My to-do lists have gone from the hopeful to the mundane, with my summer plans of reading allegedly pretentious literature, completing video games and catching up on tv shows reduced to finding time to actually go out and maybe even wash my hair. Not that I'm a tramp. At all.

Never mind. Tomorrow, I'm visiting the Angel of North for the 5th time in the past 4 weeks. I'm definitely living the dream.

24 hours and 34 minutes.

At the time of writing, that's exactly how long it is until my 18th birthday begins and I can finally stop playing my 'Stars in their Eyes' inspired game of "Tonight, I'm going to be..." with other people's passports/driving licenses. Thank God.

My Mum's running round in a tizz of preparation for the fiasco that will be my birthday party: what began as "I'm inviting the family round, don't ask anyone else!" has metamorphosed into "You can have a few friends there if you like", finally arriving at "Yes, they can all come!". This probably has something to do with the serious amount of cake she's bought for the occasion... not that I'm complaining. As a pseudo-pensioner, I specialise in all things cakey... something my friends complain about ("Beth, most of your crack is about food!") until they're actually eating whatever it is I've baked. Unless it's blueberry muffins. Which I'm pretty sure were poisonous. Needless to say, that was the first and last time I've ever made a low fat recipe.

Having just finished my A-levels, I have a ridiculous amount of time on my hands. Of course, there are various productive ways I could use this (charity work, writing a book, learning how to actually work a washing machine), but for now this is my plan:

• Find a birthday dress! Preferably something NOT flowery, since I counted and I now own ten floral dresses/skirts and, let's face it, it's getting out of hand.
• Complete Assassin's Creed on the XBOX. Because I'm a massive nerd... with a terrible attention span.
• Read lots of big scary books I've been meaning to read. I've just started Dostoyevsky and have had to lighten it up by going back to Agatha Christie.
• Watch 90210 online, because everyone keeps telling me how good it is!
• Actually dust my room. Even though I maintain that a small amount of dust is good for my asthma, helps me build up resistance etc, I know I'm talking crap and it's really quite trampy.

Of course, first I have to survive my holiday to Malia. In a hotel down an alleyway. I'm not feeling wonderfully optimistic.