This is my first blog. It’s going to be a short one to give you an idea of who I am, where I’ve come from and the importance of persistence.
On a blue summer’s day, I opened the sticky flap of an envelope that bore my name. Inside was a wad of certificates, belying their own importance by having been stuffed in there like any other letter; reduced to the contents of a cheap envelope.
Those A5 slips of paper were printed on specialist equipment; the embossing and colour detail was enough to confirm this. And yet the envelope was a false security of a future I couldn’t see; it was the Schrödinger's cat of achievement.
As I stood there in the school hall, with its worn wooden floor and scratchy dirt granules, I was simultaneously a success and a failure. I didn’t want to open the envelope but everyone was doing so, and they seemed so happy having done so.
I pulled the slips from their hideout; they barely wanted to budge having been stuffed into a space too tight for their bulging false egos. I leafed through them as friends gathered around me to compare their pieces of paper with my own.
Some of them had already checked, others were checking whilst glancing at those standing next to them. These were the results of my GCSEs, grades that would allow me to study A Levels (the American equivalent are the AP examinations).
The noise around me diminished, as it often does when we’re intensely focussed. I looked at the first result, then the second, third, and fourth, until I arrived back at the beginning. It was like sifting through my favourite trading cards, only I’d pulled a duff pack.
I pleaded with my tutor for help, and he brushed me off quite simply by saying that I didn’t have the grades required. No one’s parents were there; it was a student specific event. That was it. As a fifteen-year-old, I was spoken to as an adult and told I’d reached the end of the line; there was nothing that could be done. I was a disease in the education system. There were no tears, no panic, no success, no guidance; only failure.
I started work soon after this. Then one day, two years later, I woke up and decided I had to read. I went to Borders in Birmingham and bought books I was incapable of reading and read them. They were: Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism; Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract; Homer’s Odyssey; and Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. The latter I bought from an enticing display stand at HMV.
I left work, attended college to undertake a course that would give me access to university as a mature student, and then attended university where I studied a BA in English Literature and eventually an MA in Creative Writing.
It’s often these tragic moments that haunt us most fiercely. My failure at GCSE level was more palpable than any success I had at university. Despite the journey, I recall how nonplussed I was when I graduated; it all seemed so unimportant. My perception of the paper I’ve accrued amuses me.
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