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.

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Walking The Dog

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