Keeping Up With Juliette

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  In 2020, on the day that my class left year 11 due to Covid-19, my biology teacher, Miss McCullagh, gave us all a green card with a thoughtful message from her written on it to wish us all the best of luck for our futures. It is a card that I still treasure to this day,  2 years later, not only because it reminds me of what a great teacher she was and what a fantastic school it was that I went to, despite its abrupt ending, but also because it has a really profound message written on it that I've perhaps grown to understand more as the years have gone by. "Learning never ends" is what my biology teacher wrote and this is a quote that couldn't be more true in life. After I'd finished my GCSEs I wasn't necessarily under the impression that I would stop learning because I knew I was going into sixth form, a place where I would be able to advance in my education. But when I got into sixth form, I began to rea...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I'm sure most people are aware of the horrors people experienced not so long ago, of the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that were birthed out of the 20th century. There was Hitler and the Nazis in Germany who attempted to build a superior race and in the process wiped out 6 million Jewish people who were considered to be racially impure. There was also Stalin in the Soviet Union who scared the Russian people into submission with the Stasi and the threat of the Gulags. There was also Mao who launched his notorious Great Leap Forward, forced people to produce cheap pig iron which destroyed the economy and in the process initiated a famine where some 40 million people died. These events on the grand scale of time, happened not too long ago from the time period we are living in now and I'm sure a lot of people are aware of how quickly our now free society is capable of reverting back to this state of destruction.  Ho...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  A couple of weeks ago now, I wrote about my experience training as a river tour guide with Scudamore's Punting Company in Cambridge. If you haven't read that post yet, I would recommend that you do because it explain the process behind becoming a river tour guide and my thoughts on the experience I had whilst training with the company. I will leave a link to that post here . However, if you have already read that post, you'll know that quite a lot (sh*t) went down. 😂💜 You see, I went into this whole training completely unaware of how difficult everything was going to be. I knew there was going to be information that I would have to remember and quite a lot of physical exercise involved in the job, but I didn't realise just how much information I would have to remember and just how much physical exercise was actually involved in the job 🤣. Hence why initially I got my punting pole stuck in the bridge, I crashed t...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Although I would say that my experience with dance in year 13 was a little disappointing because we had very few practical classes, one of the things that I did kind of enjoy doing were the workshops. In these workshops, the school would bring outside choreographers and teachers to come teach master classes to us in person. Initially these workshops were just for students who worked really hard and put in the most effort at school. I thought that I would be one of these students but it turns out I was actually never picked for these workshops. This just exposes the way things worked at Impington! However, I guess because this system really didn't work, the workshops were eventually made available to everyone who did dance and performing arts at the school. This was how I was able to eventually attend these workshops. One of the dance workshops I did, was actually hosted by Cambridge Youth Dance Company, a dance company for you...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  A couple of weeks ago whilst my sister and my dad were both out, me and my mum decided to watch this French film that was put on the BBC called Grâce á Dieu (By the Grace of God). The film was quite a raw and graphic retelling of a true story but nevertheless, I found it was quite interesting to watch as it taught me a lot about the morality of the church and how it can hide behind its own façade. The film begins by focusing on a man called Alexandre and his family who live in Lyon. Everything seems to be pretty normal at first - Alexandre has two sons, a devoted wife, and is clearly a deeply religious man. But soon after Alexandre is introduced to the film, he reveals to us that he was in fact indecently taken advantage of as a boy  by one of the priests he was in contact with whilst he was on a religious camping trip in Ireland. This priest ended up remaining a prominent member of his church at the time, despite the hor...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I've been writing blog posts for a while now and a lot of them have been about school and my life as a student. I started writing casually at the age of 12 years old when I was nearing the end of year 8, and then I finished my final few student-life blog posts in May of this year, when I finished my IB studies as a year 13 student. Who knows if I will return to education in the future, but right now I am definitely getting a taste of the real world.  I didn't expect to get offered anything so soon after my exams finished but recently I applied for a job with a punting company in Cambridge. I applied because I wanted to get the job in time for the summer when there would be lots of tourists coming to Cambridge, and I also saw on the job advert that the position would be very suitable for young people taking a gap year, so I thought I would jump at the chance of giving it a go. The position I applied for was to be a history...