I glided smoothly away without any rollback but the minor errors kept piling up until her sheet of paper became blackened with tiny vertical hyphens.
I returned to the test centre and waited for the examiner to deliver the bad news.
‘I’m pleased to say …’ she started and I knew I’d passed.
The biggest lesson I took from it all was that the secret to succeeding at tests is not, actually, to get a fantastic mark. Succeeding at a test means not defining yourself according to the outcome. It means reminding yourself that you exist separately from those ticks in the margin and that most of life is an arbitrary collision of serendipitous or random events and no one is awarding you percentage points for how you live it.
Since then, I have tried to adopt this mindset, of someone who has made the effort to understand who they really are, what they care about and what their values are rather than what grades they think they deserve. After all, the person awarding those grades might simply be having a bad day or might not agree with what you believe about Prospero’s role in The Tempest or whether you think Richard III really did kill the Princes in the Tower (it was definitely Henry Tudor). But that doesn’t mean you’re a failure as a person.
Of course, that is not to say exams are unimportant. They are. They give you discipline and focus. Good results can be a conduit to a more expansive life with greater opportunities. They can get you into universities and fulfilling careers and they can give you confidence in your own abilities. I’m not one of those people who, every year when A-level results come out, takes to social media to pontificate pompously about how none of it really counts and, hey kids, I left school with an E in Snail Breeding and Advanced Crochet Work, but look at me now – I’m a C-list reality TV star with 120,000 followers on Twitter and a boohoo.com clothing line. No, I think exams are important. But I also think we need to keep them in perspective. No one deserves to pass a test simply because they believe they’re entitled to a positive result. Nor are we wholly defined by exams; it’s just that working hard and doing well at them can occasionally help us get to where we want to be.
And sometimes, if we don’t end up where we’d planned or we’re forced to confront the humiliation of a failed science exam or an undead bat flying around a classroom, it can make us understand all of the above.
That is its own kind of success.
I got into Cambridge University. I did well at my exams there too, having fallen into the habit of doing everything I could to achieve the best grades. I enjoyed my time at Cambridge because, true nerd that I am, I loved my subject and geeked out reading Plato and studying war memorials and writing essays with linking words such as ‘nevertheless’ which I thought made me sound intelligent (I was wrong).
I also met my best friend, Emma. She was standing in the corner of the college bar one evening in freshers’ week. A half-Swedish blonde-haired sexpot, she wore a slogan T-shirt with ‘One for the rogue’ emblazoned across the front and was holding a pint in one hand. Inevitably, she was surrounded by a gaggle of slavering men who could barely keep their tongues from flopping out of their teenage mouths.
Whoever that is, I thought as I walked in and ordered my old lady gin and tonic, we are so not going to get on. At first glance, Emma looked like one of the popular girls I had lived in fear of since the days of Siobhan. But then one of the men I knew vaguely from halls beckoned me over and introduced us, and Emma looked straight at me, ignored all the guys trying desperately to get her attention, and started quoting dialogue from the Austin Powers film. She turned out to be so incredibly funny and so disarmingly unaware of her own gorgeousness that, right then and there, I fell in platonic love.
Emma has the most darkly hilarious sense of humour I’ve ever encountered, and it’s so unexpected because she looks so sweet and pretty when you first meet her, and also because later in life, she became a psychotherapist and a very seriously successful person. The contradiction is part of her considerable charm. In our final year at university, we lived together in student rooms. We used to have friends over for ad-hoc dinners, although because we had no kitchen, we were severely limited in what we could offer in terms of food (most of the time it was guacamole, I seem to remember). Emma and I washed the dishes in the bathroom basin, and left them to dry on the window-sill, which meant that occasionally we’d be awoken by a dramatic crashing sound as soap-sudded plates slipped off the ledge and ricocheted into the alley below. I truly hope no passerby was ever injured, but I cannot guarantee it.
After graduating, I upgraded to a place with a kitchen and lived in a house-share in Clapham, along with approximately 98 per cent of nicely spoken, middle-class recent graduates hoping for a career in the media or management consultancy.
In my imagination, after the success of my university years, this was going to be a halcyon period of my young adulthood. I had been an inveterate fan of the 1990s TV drama This Life, which followed the lives and loves of twenty-something lawyers who sported cool hair and cracked jokes like pistachio shells. On This Life, everyone slept with each other and drank together and smoked in their house with the windows closed because there was no one to tell them not to.
I thought my twenties were going to be spent in similarly low-lit bedrooms, where I would burn a perfectly judged stick of soft jasmine incense and have a great piece of contemporary art casually slung on the wall. In the mornings, I would be hungover from the wild night before, but hungover in a messily attractive way, like a girl in a music video with tousled hair.
I would get up and make myself an espresso even though I didn’t really like espresso and I would sit at the communal kitchen table and laugh throatily at some clever comment made by one of my handsome male house-mates, who was probably in love with me but couldn’t admit it yet.
I would scrawl witty reminders of our weekly house dinners on Post-it notes that I would stick on the fridge, which would only ever contain bottles of champagne, vodka, gel eye masks and a tub of low-fat cottage cheese and then I would leave for work, wearing high heels and a silk blouse and a tailored skirt, and probably designer shades because I could afford them now that I’d paid off my student loan and, besides, it was going to be perpetually sunny in my twenties.
That, at least, was the plan.
The reality didn’t quite match up.
The house in Clapham was lovely, as were my house-mates (one girl and two boys, none of whom was in love with me, unforgivably) and the rent was absurdly low. My room was on the top floor and had a sloping ceiling and a window looking onto the back gardens of the next-door street. I felt like James Stewart in my favourite film, Rear Window. Except without a cast on my leg. And without witnessing a murder. Apart from that, though, totally the same.
In other ways, my twenties did not live up to the hype. I had envisaged an age of carefree light-spiritedness, in which I would finally be able to do what I wanted in both work and play. All the hard stuff – exams, finals, student foam parties – was over, I thought. Now I’d finally be able to forge my own path and spend my own money, free of the chafing restrictions of family, school or university.
But what actually happened was that I had a hard time balancing all the various aspects of my life and my identity, which (although I didn’t realise it at the time) was still very much in the process of forming. My twenties were a constant juggle between adult responsibility and youthful impulse and often I felt as though I was failing in both areas.
The house-share, for instance, should have been
