Text And The City
I wonder if anyone has thought to hold a test case on exam nerves. Is the crucial half-hour before a licence to kill? Are there grounds for acquittal owing to exam-provoked stress-slaughter? I'd be very surprised if there had not been at least one violent death on the hallowed polished marble of Exam Schools; indeed in 1467 one Gerald Pontefract murdered a fellow student with a sharpened quill-pen over the ownership of a white carnation. The flower slowly turned pink with seeping blood, then red, and that, ladies and gentleman, is the origin of the ancient University tradition of carnations! OK, so this is a complete fabrication, but it's at least as plausible as half the lies they tell on those tour buses.
There's no denying that there are some people you really do just want to kill before exams, and starting in 0th week as a marginalized modern linguist only feeds that ire. You turn up in college and everyone gasps in horror, as if you were Banquo's ghost bringing with you portents of future doom. You draw sympathetic but covertly relieved glances, as if being led to the scaffold. There are some people who have to make that waiting time even worse. Anyone in a scholar's gown would be the first against the wall. They are truly asking for a slap with a mortar board, standing there in their flowing garments like some kind of Hogwarts' prefect, while the rest of us skulk about like Ron Weasleys whose robes have shrunk in the boil-wash. That's assuming, that is, that unlike me and most of my friends you managed not to lose your gown sometime in second year after too many drunken formal halls.
Also on the hit-list would be anyone who is blatantly bilingual and about to undertake an exam in that language. Anyone who insists on gibbering in your ear about their year abroad, or a post-match analysis of everything they said in their orals.
Anyone who actually looks good in sub fusc, as opposed to resembling a rumpled reject from the St Magdalena's School for Wayward Orphans. You even start to fantasize about making a burning heap of your poor blameless clothes themselves.
There's a white shirt in my cupboard that will certainly be lucky to survive the term, and a skirt that is never being taken out to Park End ever again.
29th Apr 2004