The Exam Season

“I never, never want to do another exam again in my life,” screamed Quentin as he burst through the front door, “…never, ever, not ever!” And with that he hurled his battered satchel to the ground, rupturing the packet of organic puy lentils therein contained, spraying the tiny protein-packed pellets pell-mell all over the floor. “Don’t worry about it, Quentin” blustered Farhang, who rushed off in search of Darth Maul, our terrifying cat, who in his declining years is turning into the Dyson vacuum cleaner of the feline world.

This is the kind of tantrum from Quentin that my peculiar classmate in the University Drama Society would call a ‘hissy fit’. We haven’t had the misfortune of witnessing one for a while - not since the student’s Christmas Carol Concert when some hapless campanologist rang his handbell so enthusiastically during a rousing chorus of ‘Ding Dong Merrily’, that its clapper flew out, whizzed past the conductor’s head, narrowly avoiding toppling his toupée, and hit Quentin, seated in the front row, smack bang in the front teeth, mid-Gloria-in-excelsis. But that outburst was nothing compared to this one.

“Why, oh why do we have to do exams? I hate them! I loathe them! They’re so unfair…so…third epoch.” (I am not entirely sure whether the fifth epoch promises a more egalitarian way of assessing people’s intellectual capacity). “I agree,” moaned Farhang, whose English was so dubious when he first came here that when the teacher told him he was going to have an examination he dropped his trousers and stuck his tongue out.

“I mean I wouldn’t mind if they were going to get me a job or something at the end of this stupid degree course…” bewailed Quentin, and aye, there was the rub. For our friend has just spent the last three years studying Applied Macrobiotic Cookery - a science that begins and ends in herbs - and, deep down, I think he’s worried about what to do next.

“You can be anything you want to be,” said I, plucking words from the air and realising that this was the title of a self-help book I saw the other day in the Popular Psychology section of Waterstones. The authors were called Tammy and Troy Grabhorn and the picture of them on the cover suggested that this couple had really self-helped themselves - to just about every kind of cosmetic surgery available to their bulging best-seller bank balance. “I mean,” I continued plucking titles, “Feel the fear and do it anyway! Hurry your life is waiting! End the struggle and dance with life! Er…The road less travelled….” I drifted off into an incoherent mumble. Emotional intelligence is not one of my strengths.

You see, exams do strange things to people and we all have different ways to cope. When I was at school, just before entering my English exam, my classmate Pratt (by name and, I am sad to say, by nurture) told me he had already conceived what his creative writing essay would be. It was a lengthy saga about his pet parrot. When I saw the given title on the exam paper was ‘A view of bridges’ I wondered how Pratt would fare. Later I asked him what he had written. ‘Easy,’ he replied, ‘I began the essay - “Bridges is the name of my pet parrot”. And Pratt, not surprisingly flunked English.

I have to say I also panic somewhat when facing exams. My driving test was a fiasco. Approaching the end of the session, my examiner quizzed me, ‘If you drive through a deep puddle and your brakes get wet, how would you dry them off,’ I broke out in terminal perspiration. ‘Er…a towel?’ I ventured. That was test number one. The next four were not much better.

But I suppose examinations do serve a purpose. Perhaps, I muse, they are the material manifestation of a spiritual reality - uh-oh Roscoe is getting profound. If you need to know how well you have learned a lesson, taken something in, internalised knowledge, gained understandings - well, it’s quite a good thing to be tested, isn’t it?

“No it’s not!” snapped Quentin, “I’ve been making perfect mung bean rissoles all year at home and what happens in the exam? Total internal collapse followed by spontaneous combustion. It looked like I learned my craft from the Stephen King Cookbook! I couldn’t even get away with the ‘Persians call it tadik’ excuse!”

Such is student life. Or was. This is the last Roscoe’s World from our serene student household. Who knows where we’ll be when I file my next missive, as we embark into the big, wide world. Good luck everyone with your exams.