10 important things learned during a week off to revise for an exam

1/ Booking a train ticket on Thetrainline.com appears to be impossible.

2/ Booking a return to Swindon on thetrainline.com’s big rival, Qjump.co.uk, is an exercise in frustration.

3/ Indeed, while Qjump says it is “the faster way to buy train tickets online” this is presumably only in comparison to the aforementioned thetrainline.com, which is dysfunctional. Or unfunctionable. Either way, booking tickets on thetrainline.com could, in theory, take until infinity, although I waited only half this time before giving up and going to Qjump.

4/ Booking a return to Swindon on Qjump takes longer than purchasing a return flight to San Francisco, plus hotel accommodation. This is true.

5/ I’m beginning to obsess about booking train trips.

6/ Maybe I should give up going to Swindon, and go for a real adventure instead. Like Ben Hammersley, who just ran seven marathons in seven days across the dusty vastness of the Sahara desert. Most of it on a broken ankle too, the big muppet.

7/ He’s planning new escapades involving vast distances and solitude, although I note he’s never been to Swindon, as far as I know. Coward.

8/ But he does know how to issue a good software tip. Over a drink on Monday, he pointed me in the direction of iRecordMusic, a lovely $20 OSX app that records streaming audio – including all the BBC’s feeds – on to your hard disk in a format suitable for iTunes and your iPod. It even manages its recording schedules using iCal, the OSX diary app. Lovely.

9/ This means I can finally find out what other people say when they’re reviewing the morning papers on JoAnne Good’s late night/early morning show on BBC London. This is a Good Thing (pardon the pun), as it’s normally way past my bedtime, and so on the occasions I’ve done it I’ve always been very worried I’m ruining the tone of the show – by being too serious or too light, or too something else that’s not quite right. Which rhymes, you know.

10/ When it comes to exam revision, I’ve got a real issue with work avoidance. I mean – I’m making up rhyming fucking couplets for goodness sake, rather than doing more Porter or Ansoff or Winstanley…