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the day goes on. Cass’s hair is also wavy and sort of golden brown and would be okay if it wasn’t taking about ten years to grow out her fringe. She has had a sort of fringe for as long as I’ve known her (a year), but apparently she got it cut when she was about eleven and has been trying to grow it out ever since. But every time she goes to the hairdresser the hairdresser trims the end bits ‘to frame her face’ so she can never get rid of it. In fact, the only one who has nice hair is Alice. She has shiny, well-behaved proper golden blonde hair, the sort of hair no one really has in Ireland unless they dye it. This is because her mum is German and incredibly blonde. Alice’s mum came over here in the eighties when she was a student and for some weird reason she loved Ireland so much she couldn’t bear to leave. She says she thought Ireland was a magical place and by the time she realised it wasn’t she had made lots of friends here and had got together with Alice’s dad so she liked it anyway. Alice can speak German perfectly. The first time I heard her talking to her mum ‘auf Deutsch’ (as they say) it was really weird – it sounded so strange to hear perfect German coming out of ordinary old Alice. But there you are.
    Alice doesn’t do German at school, even though she would get all As if she did, because as far as I can tell her German is better than our teacher’s. She certainly sounds properly German, whereas Frau O’Hara sounds like someone from Cork who just happens to be speaking German, which is basically what she is. But anyway, Alice thought doing German with a bunch of halfwits like me, who take two weeks to learn how to ask for directions to a youth hostel, would give her an unfair advantage so she did French instead. This is because she is a good person (or possibly mad). I, of course, am not good at all and if my mother was German there is absolutely no way I’d have done French. This is why Alice is a better person than me. Every so often she offers to help me practise German conversation. I always say no, mostly because I know it’s because she’s heard me speaking German and knows how bad my German is. She just feels sorry for me. Cass (who does Spanish) says I’m being silly and should take advantage of having a special tutor but it’s actually embarrassing talking so badly in a language to someone who speaks it properly (I don’t think Frau O’Hara notices, her own German is pretty awful. According to Alice, of course. I’m hardly one to judge).

TUESDAY
    Today for the first time this term Miss Kelly actually did proper normal geography instead of telling us about the end of the world. I never thought I’d say this, but it was kind of a relief just to listen to her waffle on about the Ruhrgebiet and the sorry state of German industry in general . All those long descriptions of tidal waves crashing over Dublin and killing us all were freaking me out. Also, I was secretly getting afraid that she was never going to teach us anything on the course and we would all fail our Junior Cert. I mean, I always welcome anything that can distract a teacher from the actual class (which is why we always try to get Mrs O’Reilly to tell us about the time she was visiting an ancient amphitheatre and her husband fell down the steps and into a lion pit). But Kelly hasn’t actually done anything on the course since January. Our summer tests were all about greenhouse gasses (we all got As). But sadly, the end of the world is not going to be on our Junior Cert exam. I mean, I don’t care about geography, but I don’tactually want to fail it or anything. It was even too much for Cass, who always manages to get As without doing any work at all and who is always the first to get O’Reilly onto the subject of Roman steps and how very, very slippy they were.
WEDNESDAY
    Kelly told us about French rivers today. I started falling asleep until Cass kicked me.
TUESDAY
    Oh my God, I would give anything for