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The esteemed academic Mary Beard came to my house this afternoon to interview me for a radio show she’s doing about exams. And I was taken back to my school and university days, which were (my driving test and Celebrity Mastermind aside) were the last time I had done exams. It’s 31 years since my A levels and 27 since my Finals and yet so much of that time, right down to questions I had to answer (and even quotes that I used) are still in my brain. And of course, at least once a week I still have the dream where I am about to sit or am sitting some exam from my youth (or even one that I didn’t take), but am my age and have not prepared and am terrified that I am about to wreck my life by failing to get the results I need. Sometimes I care, sometimes I am very blasé. Sometimes that dream seems to take in several months of time as the exams approach - or do I just keep returning to the same dream? Terrifyingly the dream kind of came true within the interview as Mary, remembering that I had scored a nearly perfect mark on my Latin exam when I was 14, started giving me Latin questions to answer. And though I was fantastic at Latin 35 years ago (the last time I did it), there was only the briefest residue of the language left in my brain. Yet even then suddenly the “Amo, Amas, Amat†verb structure popped out, as well as part of a little play we had performed in class, led by my favourite ever teacher Mr Moore, when I’d been a farmer who had to chant “Euge, euge, agricolae hodie non laborant!†(forgive me if spelling or tense is wrong there).
I relived the nightmare of doing my Finals, the only time in my life I have had to do major exams that I was totally unprepared for. Mary suspected that I was exaggerating my lack of readiness (especially as I came out with a reasonable degree), but around this time in 1989 I was a blubbering mess, having squandered my amazing opportunities to learn at one of the greatest Universities in the world and instead do loads of comedy and acting and eating crisps. In the long run my choice had been a good one, but the prospect of failing an exam of this import made me almost suicidal and certainly had me considering whether I should ask to be allowed to defer the exams to the following year. I got drunk for most of the middle of the last term as I accepted I was doomed and then pulled myself together in the last two or three weeks, borrowed notes, worked out what questions were likely to come up and bluffed my way through. The only book I read cover to cover though was a trashy book about whether the Rudolph Hess who’d been imprisoned in Spandau was actually a double. Which was not going to come up in the exam.
Of course none of it was really going to matter anyway. My degree has probably only ever got me one job, when it impressed the boss of an advertising sales company I worked for in late 1989 (from which I was sacked within six weeks). I think I even knew at the time that it wasn’t really going to make that much difference to my life, it was more a matter of pride. I had always done so well at exams and always prepared very hard because I loved the competitiveness and the ranking and the fact that this was a part of life that could be certain and given a percentage. Failure, even though it was deserved in this case, would have been a humiliation for the young me.
I showed Mary the book that I had shoplifted during my cramming because there weren’t enough copies in the library and I didn’t have enough money to buy it. I put out an apology to MH Keen who wrote it, but alas too late as I see he died in 2013 (though he probably still got the money for stolen ones).
Just thinking about that time makes my chest and stomach swirl with anxiety. I don’t know how much of my stuff will end up in the final programme but it’s always a pleasure to see Mary Beard and an exquisite torture to be quizzed on Latin by her. She was also impressed by the bust of Hercules on my house.
In the evening with the wife out and the baby asleep and the EU Referendum looming I played a very important frame of snooker to help you decide how to vote (apparently I’ve already done this before, but have no memory of it). It was an extraordinary and embarrassing frame with some almost unbelievable snookers and some supernatural happenings. But at least you’ll know how to vote if you listen. I apologise.
