Basket.

School's still in the thick of exams, and invigilation is intensely boring. No wonder invigilators, now or then, never look like they want to be there. AFter a while, you just run out of things to do, and I found I couldn't remember enough Physics or Maths to attempt their papers at all. The questions hadn't changed much at all though, and were sufficient to evoke some very grim secondary school memories.

Anyway, I was invigilating Literature that day; A Midsummer's Night Dream, which I idly picked up and read after duly noting the extremely skewed gender ratio (26 girls, 5 guys, which is more than 5:1 - talk about stereotypes). I found to my mild surprise that I can actually understand Shakespearean English. But I was only surprised probably because Literature is something of a forgotten subject for me: always hung around but never paid much attention to. I then realised that it was the only humanities subject I took, in one form or another, for all six years of secondary school and JC (did not take O-Level History, or A-Level Geography). And I'm not teaching it, because somehow I didn't think I could.

I probably can, anyway, and was hypnotised because I remembered Literature from JC, where Shakespeare tends to be the least of one's problems (fortunately, we did not end up with Othello). I'll rather have the Bard than be Donne for, Woman Warrior seemed to be full of baffling tangents and absurdist works are never fun except maybe for the playwright (Pinter did become a Nobel laureate) - although Translations was fine and Hard Times did not mean hard times for us. The worst by far was really Donne, because I never got used to old English, it was amazingly difficult to read and even harder to pick out choice quotes. Plenty of schoolmates look at the man and the artist through rose-tinted lenses and I must wonder why.

In addition, A-Level Literature has one of the most exhausting exam formats (or had; might not be the same now): 3 papers, 3 hours each, 45 minutes per question except for PC, unseen, with double the time. That is ten essays to be written in 9 hours. Not many good memories from there, either.

Six years but never really got into the subject, though. It was always just... there. Not many complaints from me about it, but not my speciality either. It didn't come to mind, unsurprisingly, when I was nosing around for a job last year. Perhaps it ought to have.