Patrick Leigh-Pemberton: I have had it with all these lies

I have had it with all these lies. I am finally going to lay out a couple of truths about what I really feel about exam season. To all of you with whom I have had a conversation in these past couple of weeks, I apologise, for I am truly about to rip the wool from your eyes, which I have heard is an uncomfortable experience. To those of you with whom I haven’t had a conversation recently, I apologise; I have been busy.

I do not enjoy exams. I don’t. I may say I do, but I don’t. I also hate having to recollect the experience of an exam in order to facilitate normal conversation. I don’t blame those people who ask how an exam went, or how my revision is going. I get it, it is topical and it’s a shared experience, it’s safe ground to start conversation on. But when I say I enjoyed an exam, it is merely because it is more shocking than saying “it went alright/well/abysmally”. The tactic here is to get my interlocutor to despise me rather than to sympathise with me, in the hope that we can switch onto another topic of conversation. I don’t want to talk about these things at all.

Similarly, all the posturing that I go in for about not revising very hard, finding other things to do with my time, is all lies. All of it. I am actually quite stressed about what’s coming up. I may be fairly confident but these exams sort of matter, just the littlest bit. That littlest bit is enough to pique my academic arrogance to the point where I do feel the need to succeed. A little bit. What I am doing when I say I don’t care, or that I would love to go for a drink, is pretending that it doesn’t matter. By pretending I don’t care I am making excuses for my eventual underperformance. So yes, I really am sorry to all of those people who have been cross with me for my apparent blasé approach to these hurdles in the long race that is academia. Most of the time, I have been just as (if not more than) nervous as you. I realise that this pretence is sort of see through. No one could be this worried without a little bit of it seeping through, and I suppose that it is this which makes the deception that much more rude. You all know that I am lying to you.

But I am also grateful that a lot of you have bought into these lies. By accepting my version of things at face value, you have done me many favours over the years. Every time exams happen, I work quite hard and lie about it even harder. People then seem impressed when I pass things, and this makes it all worthwhile. And I like that. I like that, here, we can all push to be like the swan, serene on the surface but paddling furiously underneath with ugly black paddles. But to the one person who confronted me the other day on the truth of the matter, he knows who he is, remember: swans can break your arm, so don’t push me, especially not by telling everyone else the truth. There are few things more disturbing than people going around and saying things behind your back that are disgustingly and perfectly true. And yes, I just quoted Oscar Wilde because I have the time to pretend that I am aesthetic from the 19^th Century.