This time every year, there’s one news story I can’t watch. I change the channel, put the sound off or change to teletext, but I can’t watch the joyful faces of yet another crop of students with record-breaking exam results. It may mean-spirited to some, but it takes me back to one of the most frightening times of my life and I still don’t think I’ve ever really come to terms with it.

I can remember exactly what I did the day before my A-Level results came out. I went to Shrewsbury for the day with my mum and grandma. Shrewsbury has always been one of my favourite places in England- it’s the combination of half-timbered Tudor and elegant Georgian buildings and the beautiful gardens next to the Severn, I think- and it’s often been a treat in our family to go there for the day. I can’t remember what we did or what we bought; I have a vague impression of it being rainy on the train home, but what I remember most is desperately trying not to nod off on the train, because I knew I wouldn’t sleep that night and didn’t want to make it any worse for myself.

And so it came to the day itself. It’s amazing what I can’t remember- the weather must have been reasonably fine, I suppose, but I can’t remember what I did before I walked up to school. I needed an ‘A’ in French and a ‘B’ in History and English to take up my place at Bristol; my reserve offer was something like an ‘A’ and a ‘B’ in any subject from Edinburgh where, on balance, it may have been more interesting to have gone. But one doesn’t think of these things, and it’s only in the last five years or so that I’ve come to love Scotland. The results were pinned up on a board outside the doors, as I remember, and they seemed to be in some kind of table. ‘A’ in French (for which, admittedly, I’d worked bloody hard, listening to French radio and reading around the set texts), ‘A’ in General Studies (in part thanks to a gift of a question about transport policy which was bread and butter to a regular reader of practically every railway magazine going), ‘B’ in History (a slight disappointment, but probably justified given that I missed chunks of the European side and was taught British history by one of the most ineffectual teachers going) and in English...’C’.

I remember that I laughed. Hollowly, of course, but it seemed at that point as if the universe was having its ultimate joke at my expense. I’ve tried down the years to rationalise how I could have done so badly when predicted a comfortable ‘A’ , but I don’t know what to put it down to. The school appealed against the English results en bloc as they all seemed to be at least a grade below what was expected. What I normally put it down to is that A-Level English is a spectacularly bad way to prepare somebody for studying English at university- whereas a degree course is about doing your own reading, thinking and writing, the A-Level course that I did was more about remembering salient facts about certain texts and memorising quotations. Having blown the Oxford entrance exam in style the previous autumn by getting hold of completely the wrong end of the stick in the Shakespeare question, it’s not inconceivable that by bringing my own ideas into the discussion I cooked my own goose. And I can’t remember the order in which things happened either- I certainly talked to the Headmaster at the time, but to no consequence, then came home and told my family the wonderful news. However things happened, either that afternoon or the day after my dad made an appointment for me to see the local council’s guidance people, who were very nice as I recall, but knew that I at least had good enough grades to get onto a course somewhere, and left things hanging so that they could attend to people whose futures were more in doubt than mine.

Things started moving when my folks spoke to the school- this was the point at which they confirmed that they were appealing against all the marks for English- and arranged for me to see the Headmaster again the following day. It was a very civilised meeting in his study, and I remember that he appreciated my sense of humour, but at that stage I was still shell-shocked. He actually tried to ring Edinburgh there and then to persuade them to take me, but couldn’t get through; what came out of it, however, was that he agreed to speak to Bristol on my behalf and explain the position regarding the appeal. Soon afterwards, I was called at home by the admissions tutor for my course at Bristol, who explained that given what the school had told them, he was going to go to the admissions board and try to persuade them to accept me, or at least to make me an offer for the following autumn following a resit. The following morning he called me again, to say that they were accepting me for that year; it helped, no doubt, that I’d passed the written test that was set at the same time that I was interviewed at Bristol. What I didn’t realise at the time was that some of the fifteen places on the course had been offered to people who then found that they had straight ‘A’s and decided to withdraw from Bristol and reapply to Oxford or Cambridge. There were spaces on the course, and it made more sense for Bristol to take on somebody they had on file than open the places up to clearing and make more work for themselves.

Some six weeks later, then, at the beginning of October, Dad and I took a load of my stuff down to Bristol, my aunt and uncle driving down the same day with some bedding. A couple of days later the adventure began- I’m getting an adrenalin rush just thinking about it- and ever since then I’ve loved autumn weather, the mists and streetlights- they sing to me of the one intellectual challenge I’ve ever had in my life. But I just can’t think about other people going through what I went through- it was almost as if my life was on hold for about a week. A-Levels are an imperfect system and they definitely aren’t designed to identify potential, but I can’t help wishing that everybody who keeps lobbying for them to be made harder could know what it feels like at eighteen to feel your dreams slipping away because of one lousy grade.