On the day I opened my GCSE results, my parents weren’t looking over my shoulder, cameras poised. Lucky really, because I’d just smoked 20 cigarettes …
Ah, August, the month where you have to hear again what Jeremy Clarkson got in his A-levels, to be juxtaposed delightfully (he thinks) against his later success, and parents parading how traumatic their kids’ results are for them. You’ll be hearing a lot about plucky individuals who smashed their GCSEs, come Thursday, and not so much about the ones who failed maths; their parents will instead be wondering on X how anyone is supposed to concentrate when TikTok exists.
It is not classy to boast about your exam triumphs, especially when it was 35 years ago, so a lot of parents will be claiming not to be able to remember what they got in their own GCSEs, even though that is plainly a lie – come at me, faux-amnesiacs. Can you remember your landline number from when you were a kid? Your postcode? Then you can remember your exam results. These were the only letters and numbers of any use or meaning from the first two decades of your life. They’ll be the last sequences standing, long after you’ve forgotten what number the damn machine wants to know before it will give you any cash.
