This is our last dance

Arrived at ground zero 90 minutes early. Hid. Hiding place was not that effective - a random classmate came up and asked me a question a minute ago. It's much easier to hide ahead of weekday exams, when the campus is open and you don't need to swipe through hundreds of doors to get anywhere. [My usual technique is to wait outside an exam room at the opposite end of campus to my own; today I'm in a comp lab.] I don't go down to the exam room until such time as most of the class will be already seated - I don't want to talk to anyone.

I can now do Fourier series and integrate by parts, and separate variables and find non-trivial solutions, and I can do the JCF thing for 2×2 matrices. [Chris hasn't previously put 3×3 ones in the exam, and I'm relying on him to have stuck with that this year.] I've memorised all the definitions I need to know, although it might take a minute under pressure to recall that "hyperbolic" means the derivative matrix has no pure imaginary eigenvalues. I have a calculator, a scarf, three pens, and some hayfever pills. I've even remembered to have lunch.

My biggest challenge now, as with any math exam, is not freaking out.