I dis­cov­ered this on Wikipedia today or yes­ter­day… I can’t remem­ber how.

On Sep­tem­ber 15, 1595, a group of pupils of Edin­burgh High School bar­ri­cade them­selves in because of a dis­pute about hol­i­days. When adults break in, pupil William Sin­clair shoots city bailie John McMorane dead. The boys were arrested but acquit­ted later.

Um… proof vio­lent video games aren’t the sole cause of school shoot­ings? They were even acquitted!

Yeah, tan­gen­tial. Whatever.

I think I absolutely killed Exten­sion Eng­lish today. Not by shoot­ing, but still. Felt very good about the whole thing. My cre­ative was an inver­sion of a story I’d pre­vi­ously writ­ten for an exam (this was the clos­est I think I’ve ever gone to repeat­ing myself in what I write for an exam), which was based on Robert Browning’s poem The Lab­o­ra­tory (go ahead, click, it’s very read­able). The last ver­sion was an extrap­o­la­tion of the persona’s expe­ri­ence (extend­ing to her mur­der of two women), whilst this is a jour­nal entry from a remorse­ful apothecary.

He knows from the persona’s mono­logue her intent is to kill two women for her husband’s [alleged] indis­cre­tions, yet is com­pelled by her imper­a­tive to “take all my jew­els, gorge gold to your fill”. After­wards, he is over­come with guilt and fan­cies he could kill him­self with a drop of poi­son dis­solved in his wine, which he takes and swills around until the col­loid is no longer vis­i­ble, dis­solved in the glass… but he does not wish to take another life, to put another mark against his already-damned con­science. So he pours the wine back into the bot­tle, with some care, and replaces the cork, return­ing it to the dark­ened cel­lar. Thus, he will die by poi­son and not at his own hand, seem­ingly freed from the damna­tion of sui­cide, absolved from his crimes — and he must die because he is London’s last apothe­cary of this kind [that is, the malev­o­lent!], bring­ing death unjustly and remain­ing beyond reproach, the crime of poi­son­ing enacted by other agents.

I’m a lit­tle annoyed we don’t get the papers back, actu­ally, but oh well. I didn’t par­tic­u­larly care about Eng­lish Advanced, but I was actu­ally quite impressed with my efforts for this one! Mod­ern, on the other hand, will be rather the oppo­site… so I must go and study. Or try to. Cram.