Hello!

I must be honest: there’s nothing freaky about this Friday at all. It’s Normal Friday if anything. I just wanted an alliterative title. Soz.

SO, we’ve just finished week 3 of the NCTJ. My mind is just slush at the moment, after a particularly intense couple of days of shorthand. This week, we’ve been challenged immensely with short bursts of 80wpm and 100wpm writing. It’s NOT EASY. I can imagine it’ll be really hard to maintain that speed over a couple of minutes in the exam. We’re looking at the use of different forms of the Teeline vowels to differentiate words/ to make the outlines clearer to read and/ or easier to write, but if anything it makes it harder, in that there are so many new rules to learn. I find it really unnatural forcing myself to use some of these new forms we’ve been taught, so I keep tripping up trying to replace what we’ve already been taught with the new theory. Full vowel A in the T-position for ‘auto’ prefixes, anyone? A huge full vowel A to represent ‘air’, ‘aer’ or ‘arch’? HIDEOUS.

We went to Magistrates Court yesterday. It was interesting, but it did feel somewhat voyeuristic, sitting in the public gallery and watching decisions being made on the lives of the people in front of us. It made me feel a bit odd, but it’s just something I’ll need to get over. Also it was hard to hear lots of what was being said, as there were big plastic slats separating us from the courtroom, and the defence lawyers kept turning their microphones off. Mostly pretty middle-of-the-road, tedious cases, but we got an interesting art fraud case, and a really bizarre harassment case. And a man who stole a bottle of wine and two cooked chickens from Tesco. Very weird.

Desperately trying to untangle the insane amount we’ve learnt in PA this week, about local government and the council. On a related note, nice to see Labour doing so well yesterday. HOORAY.

ANYWAY, I’m still trying to hammer out an essay for uni (nearly done now) so I’ll get back to that. And practise some shorthand. 500 hours of shorthand. Oh my god…

Kayleigh