Exams!! A mini rant, or perhaps more of a parental worry-fest.

Exams! - the only thing (apart from something ghastly happening to one of my children) I regularly get nightmares about: ones that wake me up in a cold sweat just at the point when the paper has been turned over, read from start to finish and I realise that I can't do any of it!

Best part of an exam - the moment when you are told to stop writing. Finished. Over. Complete. Followed rapidly by one of the very worst bits, when you leave the exam hall and everyone starts to gush about what they wrote and you start to subtract marks in your head for all the questions you got wrong. The only way to avoid this bit is to sprint from your seat and don't stop running until you are well and truly on your own. Then it might be necessary to embark on an expedition, or emigrate, at least until all the post exam chatter among your peers has died down. Alternatively, invest in ear plugs.

The next worst thing about exams - results day. You have just about convinced yourself and very probably your parents that maybe things weren't to bad, maybe you did just enough to get the good grades. Then inevitably, results day arrives. Perhaps you could still be abroad, preferably alone, stiff drink at the ready. You especially want to avoid being at the breakfast table and having an anxious audience all biting their lips, distractedly stirring and stirring the tea and watching you open that envelope. One particularly sadistic method of conveying results was used at my university and to this day there is still a part of that city that I struggle to walk past at this time of year, where exam results boards are displayed for all to witness the true folly of your efforts.

Then, just when you are getting on with your life and, apart from nightmares, putting exams firmly behind you, your kids start doing them! And they really matter! And sometimes they don't seem to matter quite as much to your kids, or to their friends. So now in addition to exam fear, you add in an unhealthy dollop of anxious, fretting, but trying-terribly-hard-not-to-fret parent and what happens - the kid gets more and more chilled and the nightmares come back with a vengeance!

All the above is true, but maybe I have been lucky - things have generally turned out right (apart from that History exam when I missed out a whole essay, and a resit (oh dear) I had to do at university). And kids so far have done fine and made me proud. But they have exams tomorrow ... and I'm not sure how well I'm going to sleep.

Comments

Colour, Delacroix, flochetage and why don't we all have a go at inventing words

Yes - it is a real word. Flochetage. Well, a real-ish word. One invented by the painter Delacroix, when he found the dictionary cupboard bare and required a word to describe his technique of layering different coloured paints, using lightly pulled brush strokes to create texture and pattern and thereby enhance his base-layer colours (... lost? - stick around, read on and all will become clear. Or perhaps muddier ...). Flochetage implies both stringiness and threadiness. Apparently. And it sounds good - in a filling-the-mouth-with-sound sort of a way. Try it ... flochetaaaage. Not that I speak French. So I am probably mis-pronouncing it. Nor am I an artist. So what do I know about painting techniques - except that I think this one works. What I do like is the concept - you invent a new technique in whatever it is you do, hunt around for the vocabulary to describe it, find the dictionary is lacking, so make up a word of your own and announce to the world what it means. Delacroix isn...

My beloved boy, how lucky I have been

It's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die ... and I say someone here even though the one in question was a dog - but to us he had character and a place forever in our hearts and was more of a familiar someone than some of the people in our lives. So, I'll start again - it's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die, our senses go into overdrive. We notice things that normally would be part of the background of our every day. We breathe more - or rather, we don't but what we do is notice our breathing more, as we watch his. We pause. We think. We listen to ourselves and our inner voices speak. Memories flood our dreams ... though sleep is fitful. Why am I telling you this? ... ... we lost this beautiful boy today And in the hours before he went, I saw perfect spheres of dew on blades of grass - little orbs holding micro-images of our world; a bumble bee drunk on nectar, yellow-dusted with pollen, resting in a crocus; ten - yes, ten! ...

Walking, wondering and not walking at all

We all walk. I walk every day. I also lie. I don't walk every day, as in I don't take the dogs for a walk every day. Poor boys, in this season of tax returns and desperate seeking of extra work and working to pay the tax bill, they are the losers. Four-legged-friend was looking distinctly skinny in his hind legs, when I brushed his coat while he wolfed down his supper this evening (he tries to eat the brush if I take it near him at any other time, so meal times have become grooming times). Oddly, I lose out on the walking too, but this fails to have the same effect on my 'skinniness'... Anyway, we all walk. We walked on Christmas day - Littlest and I walked at the weekend - Slowly. Time to appreciate the trees. Time to encourage the smelly boys into the freezing water. Time for the sun to go down. Time to walk very, very slowly - Littlest's finger phone was engaged throughout in deep discussion with the zoo warden - da...

Walking The Dog

Search This Blog