I have finally completed my last written examination with CTC aviation, so as of now any testing I get will be purely practical inside the A320 simulator. To say it's a relief is an understatement, but I have no doubts about the difficulty of any further tests. After the written exam (performance) our final day of technical ground-school was actually a lot more relaxed, the focus switching to crew resource management. Our instructor used the session to actually look at what was going to happen when we arrived at easyJet, discussing any fears or anxieties we had before joining the airline. I definitely found the session most beneificial and it certainly answered most quesitons I had about moving to full operations.
As I had a few days off in the middle of the week, Alice and I chose to go for a walk on the beach at Lepe, a fairly quiet beach west of Southampton water. Although the beach is quite nice for a walk, the weather was pretty wild and we looked more like members of Scott's expedition with the amount of layers we had on! As well as some old fortifications left from the second world war (many troops/vehicles left from the beach at Lepe during the Normandy landings) conveniently there was a great view of stricken car transporter Hoegh Osaka, that only a couple of days before had been beached on the Bramble Bank sandbar. As the transporter left Southampton docks it began to significantly list, and the harbour pilot knowing the waters of the Solent decided that beaching the vessel was the best course of action. 
After a couple of days off, on Friday (and after a month of no flying) I had my first lesson of intermediate, the focus of which was landings. I know it's a stupid thing to say, but officially I hadn't flown the Airbus as the requirements of basic were to fly a generic jet, and we were just lucky the jet on offer at CTC was an A320. Now that intermediate has started and the motion has been switched on, we are now learning the formal technique for flying the A320 starting with one of the most difficult manual manoeuvres, landing. The reason it's so difficult is the aircraft whilst airborne has a huge amount of energy, so the landing can be seen as a controlled crash! Ideally the technique should remove most of the energy to avoid damage, which is very similar to a light aircraft but with one subtle difference; in a Cessna the plan was to hold the aircraft off the runway until it ran out of energy, only allowing touchdown when the aircraft was incapable of staying airborne. In the Airbus, if this technique was employed the aircraft would touch down a significant distance down the runway as it's going so much faster, and therefore any performance figures calculated would be redundant. Instead, at about 30ft the thrust levers are closed (or 'retarded') and the nose is pitched up to merely arrest the rate of descent and allow the main gear to absorb the landing load. This I was initially struggling with as I couldn't get out of the habit of soft touchdowns, but as the lesson wore on I became more comfortable with the 'positive' landings. For once the saying "If there's no smoke your landing's a joke" actually has some truth!
In our second lesson we continued with manual handling, this time looking at circling approaches. For a circling approach the instrument approach is flown towards one runway, and when visual (and close enough) a visual circling manoeuvre is flown with the intention of landing on the opposite runway. This may be because of the wind or terrain which prohibits an instrument approach to the in to wind runway, and is one of the more challenging flying tasks. The crude picture i've drawn gives an idea of the circle, firstly with the green instrument element, followed by the red visual part. I went first and annoyingly I cocked up my timings, so had to perform a go-around as I didn't manage to stabilise my approach. That said, it gave me practice at flying the missed approach from a circling manoeuvre, and thankfully my second approach was as planned and I landed successfully.
Day off tomorrow so going in to CTC to use one of the virtual flight deck and flight computer trainer. There is a hell of a lot of information to learn and commit to memory, so the workload can only go one direction!
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