I did not watch your show Stargazing Live live last night. And no, it wasn’t because I was watching Famous and Fearless instead – I have a life, and it’s worth saving, just about. Oh no, I was doing something much more important. I was eating.

However, once I had gotten past the food, and the fags, and the alcohol, and a mini-feature that should have been called Debbie Does Dallas, but on a really low budget (only joking, Mum, I don’t do such things!), I finally settled down to BBC iPlayer to watch the programme at a quarter past midnight. And what a spectacle it was.

In fact, I was so enthralled by the prospect of seeking out Jupiter, or Uranus (yer, I went there!), I hastily ran downstairs to take a look myself. That is where the problems start, Dara. You lied to me!

In Stargazing Live, I was given the impression that I didn’t need the Hubble Space Telescope, an off-the-shelf telescope, nor, indeed, a pair of binoculars to see Jupiter tonight. Fortunately, I have a South-facing garden, so I looked up, with my naked eye as instructed, and saw nothing but a blur of twinkling lights.

For the love of all that is holy, Dara, you could have told me I still needed to wear my glasses to see it clearly. For all I knew, I could have been looking at a bad day at the office for an Air Traffic Controller! So inside and up the stairs I ran to grab my glasses, wipe away the smear marks and ran down to take another look.

What a view, I must say. But are you sure that your techno bods didn’t do a bit of tweaking on the graphics to make Jupiter stand out that little bit more? I’m no fool, I could tell that it was brighter than all the other stars in the sky, but really, it didn’t look anywhere near as bright as it did on Stargazing Live!

Now, I am a blogger by nature. Part of the course of blogging is photography. I don’t pretend to have a fancy SLR camera, but I do have a fairly decent camera. So I ran back upstairs to grab it, as I knew that I just had to get a photograph of this breathtaking sight.

Unfortunately, by now the only thing taking my breath away was all this running you were making me doing. Really, after what you said on stage in your last DVD, you should know that the last thing fat guys like me need to do is run! It was making me light-headed. I couldn’t think straight. I almost fell arse-over tit coming back down the stairs – then you would have had a lawsuit on your hands, Dara!

Anyway, by now I was getting cranky. So I resolved to take a couple of photographs of the sky, a couple of Jupiter, then run upstairs and go to sleep. What I didn’t notice whilst I was busy lighting my fifth fag was the?silhouette?of a rather plump pig sailing across the light?emanating?from Jupiter.

As I said, I don’t have an SLR camera. But I knew that somewhere, in amongst the myriad of manual controls available to me that I use about as I often as I use the chocolate teapot given to me for Christmas, was a setting to change the exposure length. What it definitely doesn’t have is an automatic manual finder, nor a comprehensive built-in help function, so I struggled through all the menus to try to find this blasted control.

Three pairs of batteries later and, what do you know, on the last item on the last sub-menu, there it was! Hooray!! I could set the exposure to anything between 1/30 second to 1/2 second.

Now, I’m not a genius. I’m not even close to being a genius. But even I know that 1/2 second is just a little bit off from the 30 seconds recommended on Stargazing Live. However, I had wasted so much precious blood, sweat, oxygen, tobacco and nicotine to get here, so I thought “to hell with it, let’s just get it over and done with”.

Do you know what photograph you made me take, Dara? This:

I’ll not beat about the bush, Dara. I almost had a heart attack. I thought that my camera, a Kodak, no less, had been hacked into and taken over by Microsoft when this flashed up. It’s a Google slave’s worst nightmare. Pretty? If you squint, it may be. But Jupiter? It most certainly is not!

Now I did Physics at A-level. By which I mean, I got an E, but don’t hold that against me! The photograph above reminded me of something, but I couldn’t work out what. For about half a second. Then it came to me. In 2007, I took a photograph of a single source of light being screwed up by a moron, and posted it on my blog:

You see, Dara, the resemblance is uncanny. With the obvious exception that the latter image was of an extremely bright immediate source of light rather than a planet at least 365 million miles away from us reflecting light from the Sun.

It even got me confused, and wondering whether or not this was actually Jupiter. Perhaps someone at the restaurant had added a bit of magic to the mushrooms accompanying my steak. Then I looked up at the sky and Jupiter had returned to being a white dot again.

You lied to me. You got me excited over nothing. You made me waste precious calories running up and down stairs. You gave me false hope. And, to top it all, you gave me, in the end, a photograph that looked like a cross between a drawing of the chemical composition of an as-yet unidentified compound and a retarded firework.

All this from a man I once idolised and adored.

Well, no more. No more will I be won over by your soft Irish accent. Nor your child-like smile on the Mock The Week out-takes?(you know the ones, they make it on to the DVD and usually come when you know you’re talking about something that you know won’t make it into the show, and you know you should move on to a more productive topic, but “feck it”, you’re having fun!).

Oh, did I mention, I am a law student. Uh-huh. And doing considerably better at it than I did at A-level Physics! I know the system.

I expect an apology. On tonight’s show!

If I don’t get an apology. Then I shall use every last legal contact still talking to me to spread the word, Dara. Spread the unspeakable word. Of the acts, Dara. The unspeakable acts that I will Photoshop you doing to the most menacing of threatening objects. I’m talking about what you did to this, Dara:

I look forward to your apology. And complimentary VIP tickets to your next tour.

Yours in utter, utter confusion

Alan W Collins

P.S. Just to be clear, so I don’t get the PC police on me again: I was making a funny. You know, something people look at and go “ha ha”. Make them laugh. Though based on a true story, much was exaggerated, with a few juicy bits added in for flavouring. I wasn’t being serious – except about the complimentary VIP tickets. I wouldn’t say no…

The best thing I can do is to briefly analyse my results, subject by subject and unit by unit. However, before I do that, I think it would be best to return to my post-exam predictions:

* Accuracy is based on the difference between the UMS I predicted I’d get (which I didn’t publish) and the UMS I actually got.

So let’s start with Government and Politics. The exams I took in June of this year are in italics for all subjects and the accuracy of my predictions worked out as above for each subject module is also included. However, as I did not have unit totals for all modules at the time, these are likely to be less accurate than the overall subject.

Is there any point me going into this one? I couldn’t have done much better than an A. However, someone in my class managed it – so well done to Callan Davies, who came in the top five in the Country. One point I will make, though, is that my best score was in the synoptic module – mainly because I used examples from local government and a whole page on Pakistan (two of my pet topics outside the UK national and USA areas).

It seems that, for the first time in four years of doing Spanish, my reading exam proved to be my biggest downfall. SP04 was the two-and-a-half hour reading/listening exam, and my only D in Spanish. However, I managed to increase my written exam from a U to an E to a C, which I a quite happy about – and, as most people who know me will understand, I am shocked and ecstatic that the two orals were my second-best modules.

My Computing results are both surprising and confusing. I had already seen the mark sheet for my CPT6 coursework, so I knew I’d be getting a D for that. I hadn’t expected getting an A on my CPT2 resit. However, a lot of the questions focused on legal aspects of computer use, and so I should probably be happy with my result there. Few people left the CPT4 exam happy, although I am still at a loss as to why I got a U for it. In fact, it is my lowest scoring exam across the board (yes, I did worse at that than my first attempt at Physics!). Overall, though 375 is only just over the 360-mark threshold for a C grade, and thus Computing also stands as second-closest to the lower grade boundary.

Ah, General Studies. Everyone’s favourite non-subject. Because of the fact that I was doing Critical Thinking, I wasn’t supposed to to General Studies and was timetabled no lessons. However, at the last minute, I decided to enter into the full A-level and chance it in each exam. The fact that, overall, I got a C (including B in two Y13 modules) without going to a single lesson in my entire second year – or, for that matter, even looking through a textbook – shows just how much of a joke this subject really is! My biggest hope is that Rainham Mark will soon wake up to this farcical “subject”, which is not accepted by many Universities, and teach students information actually necessary in their day-to-day lives.

In many ways, I am reasonably pleased with my Physics results – I actually managed to get a (safe) grade. However, part of me is thinking that, had my Physics 2 unit not been on the same day as the driving test I passed (the excitement of which led me to do almost no revision that day!), or had I studied slightly harder for Physics 6, I would have got a D. That would have turned my results day joy into ecstasy!

A lot of people took Critical Thinking to escape General Studies (like me), believing it would be just as easy but slightly less boring (unlike me – I took it because the skills learned will be useful in a career in law and in politics). Many dropped out after F491 in January, when they discovered it’s not as easy as it looks. I only just got a C, but it is a C nonetheless, and I am more than happy with this result.

Rather than having to wait at school for my results, however, I chose to look online for my Edexcel results (General Studies and Physics) – as they are the only exam board to be offering an online results service at the moment – and found, to my utter delight and relief, that I actually got a grade for Physics.

I have said all along that if I could get a grade, even if it is just an E, I would be the happiest person in the world today. Well, suffice to say I only got an E for Physics, but it has genuinely made my day to have gotten something other than a U in a subject I was almost certain I was going to fail from the word go. And it’s not like I even scraped an E – it is a very safe E!

In General Studies I picked up a C, but if I pick up anything less in any of my other subjects, then, well, let’s just say today will be the day the dream died.

Here’s hoping – and praying! – it hasn’t come to that!

Instead, it has been hectic as I used the time to polish off many small cuttings of unfinished work (whilst listening to songs by artists such as Delirious?, Chris Tomlin and Matt Redman on my stylish new pink iPod Mini – but that’s another story altogether!).

For exampl, I cycled through my folder to find a Spanish translation text due in yesterday (I wasn’t in the lesson due to exam revision, and so was given an extension until Tuesday) and that I still needed to write the final sentence. I even finished off a past exam question on PROgramming in LOGic (or Prolog) for Computing.

But the majority of the time was spent scratching my head over the Physics homework. We were given a question to find out the distance a geostationary satellite is from Earth when we know the period (T) and the universal gravitational constant (G). Well in order to do this, the given equation (derived from Kepler’s third law) had to be re-arranged – so I worked through various parts of the equation at a time (forgetting to square the period etc.).

Period (T) is proportional to the radius of the orbit (r)

Anyway, each time I brought the results of the various parts together, the answer was wrong (the expected answer could be found elsewhere in the book). So, after half an hour, I just gave up and put the whole equation into my calculator. The cube root. And, lo and behold, the correct answer of 4.2×10⁷m (or 42Mm) was staring back at me.

So what’s the moral of the story? I should give up more often! That, or command logic in solving problems, rather than look for the most complex solution.

And what wonderful way am I celebrating this uber-sunshiny day? By taking my Physics Unit 4 exam.

By which I mean I have jsut emerged from the exam room – after 80 fun-packed minutes of Physics-related fun!

Although I’m not going to pre-empt fate and predict how well I did – that would just be rather stupid!

Just take a look at the photograph above and think about what it could be. Disco lights, you might thing? Well if you did, you’d be wrong.

In fact, the photograph above is a single light source, viewed through a series of diffraction gratings during a Physics lesson just before half term, and stands as evidence of my Physics teacher’s reassuring words to me at the beginning of the year, when he said to me (non verbatim) “it happens to quite a lot of people, about halfway through the year you’ll suddenly think “I get it”". And I did.

But why mention this now? Well the answer is simple – I don’t just get Physics now. I understand Physics. And, as I have discovered by studying cosmology in my current A-level module, I now enjoy Physics!

Because I enjoy it and understand it, I am confidant that I can now commit myself that little bit more and turn my abysmal AS-level results around to get at the very least a C in A-level Physics – something I am sure even Boris Johnson would commend.