I went to St Aelred's this morning with Dad and Nathan, conscious that the academic year was drawing to a close, in order to pick up my artwork before it all got thrown away. The weather was glorious, ELO on the car stereo, sun on my face - I was quite looking forward to seeing my artwork again after all this time - to feel the weight of the sketchbooks and the sheer size of that bloody huge A1 piece I'd done for my exam. A whole academic year had gone by, I realised, since all that stress, all that mithering, all those all-nighters with the thick aroma of coffee choking out my room.

We arrived and were received by a receptionist who asked what we were visiting for as we signed in. When I explained with a smile that I was picking my artwork up (at last!), she gave me this blank look and said that I'd be lucky if it hadn't been thrown out. She just said it, direct and devoid of sympathy. Gave Dad and I our visitor badges and hurried us on.

Panic set in as I led the way to Mr Kelly's art classroom. The walls in the corridors were indeed looking bare, and it struck me - the school wasn't just closing for the summer, it was now in the process of moving all its equipment over to Hope Academy, or chucking out what was of no value. I had this horrible revelation that my artwork was at their mercy - and I was certainly no Gustave Doré.

When we saw Mr Kelly, he simply elaborated on what the receptionist had said, only with a smile that said 'ah well, you should have come sooner!' - I could search the rooms as much as I wanted, but finding anything was very unlikely now.

You wouldn't believe the emptiness of that room. The last time I'd been there, the walls were chock full of vibrant displays; GCSE and A-Level artwork and photography; the hearts and minds of students, myself included, poured onto the page in paint, pencil and ink. Now, all the screens where work was normally mounted had been pulled down and natural light poured into the room, though not much of it as the windows were coated in that tinted plastic wrap that I recall used to make my old maths classroom in Sutton High look permanently like a room locked in dreary evening. There were a few bits of art here and there but nothing of mine.

I looked upstairs, in the bit outside the Art computer room. A glimmer of hope - boxes full of folders, boards and bits of paper in a vast array of shapes and colours, edges tattered from handling, had been piled up here. I had a preliminary perusal of these as Mr Kelly came up after us and he shot my hopes right down - they were the works of the current GCSE students; kids who had another year so their work had to be kept.

I searched all the drawers, a few of the boxes, but all I got back were two final pieces - the half-oil, half-biro 'Life-in-Death' and the full-biro 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. My 'Mariner' and 'Albatross', plus my art final piece and two sketchbooks, were both nowhere to be found. I had to face the horrendous reality then that a whole year's work had been consigned to the bin.

There's no happy ending to this journal entry, I'm afraid, nor is there an easy way to write this. I've lost a whole year of decent-quality, irreplaceable artwork. I hated the project at first - in fact, there are dozens of posts on here in which I make that perfectly clear - but as time went on, and indeed when I could finally look at it in retrospect, it became something dear to me. I came to remember fondly those nights spent slaving over a sketchbook, agonising at coffee-washed pages that took forever to dry. Those little moments of joy when I stepped back and saw something had turned out quite well - it's all gone. Worse still, I don't know how I can carry on doing art after such a heavy blow.

The two pieces I did come back with were small solace for the loss of all my work. At home, I gave the Prince's Trust people a call regarding my development grant but nobody could take my call. It got better when I then had to take a call from one of those PPI (Payment Protection Insurance) people who've taken to phone-spamming my Dad. Prats. They got snotty with me when I told them we'd had a million calls already and PPI wasn't relevant to us. "Oh, well you might have been sold it without your knowledge" - FUCK OFF, I'M AN ANGRY ARTIST AND I WILL SCREAM AT YOU.

I'm now in work, still seething and needing to have a good cry for obvious reasons. I feel like I've wasted my year. I don't know how I'm going to keep myself from breaking down and becoming a wibbly mess when Jason meets me after work and says "So, I can't wait to see your art coursework!"... stay tuned and watch as I break down in the middle of St Helens!