Five o' clock. All is quiet. Five minutes past five. I toss and turn and fire up my computer. Facebook is asleep and all my Australianian friends are clearly surfing or having a tinnie or five, so I pace, gurn, pace and gurn again. Six o ' clock I make a coffee. Two minutes past six, I am hyperventilating. Three minutes past six, I collapse.
Surely my son's results shouldn't cause this much anxiety but they do. Why? Coz the little bleeders are elsewhere, out of the country. Meanwhile, I am left to collect their passport to a better life.
Seven o'clock, I start to bleach the bathroom - now I know I am slowly loosing the plot. Bleach and I usually have a funny way of missing each other. However, refusing to logon onto the BBC website to analyse results for this year, I scrub religiously at a dubious month old stain in the toilet bowl. After a good few minutes of hard labour and knowing that this feat is nigh on impossible to achieve, I resorted to gazing into the bathroom mirror to see the latest effects of my new anti-ageing cream. Bloody waste of money that was. I defy you age! No you don't it smirks back from the looking glass.
Eight o'clock the first texts arrive from friends and family wondering how my sons have done in their GCSEs and ASs. I have no idea as the school does not deign to open its doors until nine. Eight thirty and I am wondering why sending my eldest to Papua New Guinea to work in a village and learn empathy was such a good idea and why agreeing to my twins to go to Spain was a wise decision either. Now I am going through the pain of their results and they are sunning it. The few telephone calls I have had from any of them have involved monosyllabic replies of joy such as - "sick" or "peng" or "cool". My monosyllabic replies,to the few telephone calls I have received this morning, have involved profanity such as -"f&*k" or "SH1&" or "f$%k".
Nine o'clock, I am queuing with most normal students,who are not bronzing it elsewhere, and I feel their pain. All banter has gone as the line approaches the desk. Some are white-faced huddled in corners; some are openly sobbing and others are rasping for breath. Apparently, they are the students who have achieved their grades!
My turn arrives and a poe-faced individual hands me three white envelopes without meeting eye contact. I try to make light of the situation and ask her if she would like to see my passport as I clearly look far too young to be picking up results for 17 and 16 year olds. Her answer is curt and to the point. Clearly, I need my money back from that cream!
The moment of truth is here. I start to rip open the first envelope of three.
