A-level results day is here again. I still remember the sick, cold nerves in the pit of my stomach; the feeling of having messed up – of having done something terribly embarrassing – and that was just my hangover.
Do you remember how you celebrated getting your A-level results, if you did them? I do: I went out the night before with a friend to Cafe de Paris in Leicester Square, to an under-18s disco – and then the afternoon we actually got them, we ended up at someone's house party where we all played 'Hide and Snog' (I probably don't need to spell that out for you).
We also played a few variations of the same game: 'Snog and Snog', 'Snog OR Snog' (except, full disclosure, we were growing up in Essex – so we didn't actually use the word "snog", at all. Our slang for good ol'fashioned French kissing was to "pull". So in actuality, it was 'Pull or Pull', which makes no sense at all, but we loved it.)
Also, my parents were away on holiday (related/unrelated). So, there we go.
The fact that it's A-level results day does tend to pass you by in the intervening years, once you realise that while it meant the whole world to you at the time, you don't rely on those grades much, after you reach adulthood. In fact, having stood on the other side as an employer, sifting through thousands of CVs, I can honestly say that by the time you're sourcing people for more senior jobs (in journalism, in my case), you're not even looking at those results. They're increasingly irrelevant, compared to real-world work experience. There's some comfort in that, hopefully.
But they matter more than anything at the time – of course they do. And they start to matter, all over again, as soon as you become a parent of a teenager. My daughter is only 13, but I've noticed that we're increasingly talking about what she might want to study at university: where she might live, what she needs to choose at GCSE to line her up along the right path for who she wants to be.
And, this week, I've been checking in with the parents of children who are getting their results (A-levels) and next week (GCSEs) – in my friend Katy's case, she has one of each. Eek! I wonder if the parents are more stressed than the kids?
What has interested me about our discussions about this tumultuous time, is how little some of my friends – highly successful, highly qualified, happy women – rate their experiences (and choices) of university. One friend told me: "There's far more to life than going to university – my four years was a total waste of time as far as I'm concerned! I should have gone straight to work at Disneyland at 18, become fluent in French then got a job in London. I genuinely don't believe my degree made an ounce of difference to my career."
Another said she feels there's "too much pressure on teenagers for exams that actually mean bugger all, aged 44". While one pal, who's genuinely one of the cleverest people I know, said succinctly: "There is always another way. I f****d it up and just found a different path." Trust me: if anyone's kids mess up their A-levels and end up on the same path as my friend, they'll be just fine. Much more than fine, in fact.
I'd love to hear your thoughts and reflections on exams. Did you mess up your GCSEs, GCEs or A-levels – and did it matter? How did you celebrate, or commiserate? And did you ever play Hide and Snog? Give me all the gossip on victoria.richards@independent.co.uk.
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