LAURA CARTLEDGE Life's Like That...It's a testing time and stress crops up at all the wrong moments

Weekends full of revision roll into weekdays full of work.

While my evenings are either spent with my nose buried in a book, staring hopelessly at the ceiling or heading, blurry eyed, to the kitchen for another cup of tea.

But despite all my pages of notes and colour-coded Post-it notes I only know one thing for sure – stress is a crafty emotion.

It just appears, unannounced and unwelcome.

But always at exactly the wrong moment.

Or worse still – the right moment, but you haven’t realised it.

Then it chimes up to remind you of what you’ve been trying to forget.

For me, the most frustrating is I know stress is stupid.

It doesn’t help – in fact it often makes things worse.

It would be ok if it came along to give you a push in the right direction, and then left you alone while you got on with it.

But no.

That’s just not how stress works.

I suppose with exams it makes sense.

You have one chance to sit in a room and prove to a piece of paper that you know what you are talking about.

Or rather can regurgitate what you have been told to in order to get the right grade.

I can almost forgive stress for rearing its head for such an occasion.

But why turn up when I am running late in the morning and it seems all the tights in the world have got ladders?

Making me flustered, meaning that, instead of taking a moment to breathe, or put on a pair of trousers... I run around, raiding the drawers of loved ones and bundling everything out of the ironing basket.

But why? I know it doesn’t matter.

By the time I have got to work I have forgotten about my wardrobe woes.

And in two weeks’ time I will – hopefully – be wondering what all the fuss was about with my exams.

** Bubble trouble time

I’ve never been one for walking.

My mum says it even took me a while to start. But given the option between going for a wander or staying in with my books it wasn’t a hard choice to make.

So we went to Slindon to check out the bluebells and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

It was so nice to see the carpets of blue, the birds in song and the newborn lambs leaping in the fields.

But what made it better was mum and I took along bubbles. I don’t think you can ever be too old for bubbles.

And to prove it my grandad even joined in.

Granted it was by popping them with his stick!

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