Exam stress? What exam stress?

I have a feeling that Scottish school pupils are sitting their English SQA exams today. If not, it was yesterday - we retired teachers become quite hazy about these once crucial dates - and, incidentally, I'd be fascinated to see what the new English exam paper looked like, if anyone reading this can tell me. But the discussion on the radio took me further back, as I was suddenly overcome with the sensation of being 17 and in the middle of my own Highers.

I am one of the age group who sat the very first Scottish O-Grade. Because I attended a selective senior secondary school, in the double-language stream, we were told that we would merely take such O-Grades as were deemed necessary for us individually, "in the by-going" as they said. No exam leave as such - just the day of the exam itself. We all sat Arithmetic; I also took the exams in Physics, Chemistry and Maths (not my best subjects, so an insurance policy) as well as Geography (which I would then drop until S6).

So my memory of being 17 actually slipped back to one day in S4, when I was 16. I think it may have been yesterday's sun that did it; I sat O-Grade Arithmetic on a glorious sunny morning in Hillhead High School and then I took off. I met my mother at Queen Street station at lunchtime - she coming from the school where she taught mornings, I fresh from the sums - and we hopped on a train to Edinburgh. There we climbed Salisbury Crags, sat in the sun, and went for our tea before the train home. It was my first taste of freedom.

And it was this freedom that came back to me as I listened to people recounting their exam horrors, the stress they were under, the nerves and the late night studying and the lack of sleep. I honestly remember nothing of these. I recall the freedom of being alone in the empty house with hours of study before me - for we did have exam leave in S5 - and the chance to do what I wanted when I wanted. As the sun moved round to the back garden I would take my chemistry notebook outside to swot equations (I never really understood chemistry, so everything had to be learned by rote. I scraped a Higher). I grew tanned and relaxed, though there was always some turquoise ink staining the hand I'd used to cover what I was learning. I'd take afternoons off and walk the half-hour or so to school for orchestra practice, sauntering in as the bell went at 4pm, enjoying seeing friends and adored music teachers as we rehearsed for the Glasgow Music Festival (unaccountably, this was always at the end of May, so we were actually working our butts off at the same time as studying; I actually found the tension of the Festival much worse than that produced by exams).

By the time I reached my last exams (what were they in S5? French? Chemistry?) I had been off school for perhaps a fortnight and was bored with my holiday. Yes, I did last-minute revision, but it never felt more than a kind of obligation. Maybe we'd been so rigorously pushed in class that we knew most of the stuff already. The Hamlet stuff I'd mugged up so assiduously went out of the window when I saw the question (about Shakespeare's tragic heroines - I ask you!) and switched regretfully to comedy with Twelfth Night; the Latin was its usual slightly worrying breeze of being finished almost an hour early (I never liked going over what I'd written in an exam). I always assumed, I think, that I'd pass - even in the subjects I was destined to scrape through I never believed I'd actually fail - and I was eager to get on with orchestra and end-of-term nonsense and being out in the sun with my pals. (Hillhead in these days had open corridors ...)

So my memories clashed happily with the programme on the radio as I wandered in and out of the sunny garden and felt 17 again. As to whether I'd care to be 17 again ... that's another matter.

Ah. There's something I forgot to mention: I experimented with cigarettes, in exam leave. Daring, huh?

A study in parenthesis

Found myself pondering stress, retirement and singing over breakfast this foggy morning. As usual for as long as I can remember - certainly since I was 12 - this time of year is a whirl of activity which is nothing to do with buying presents and drinking mulled wine in Christmas Markets (if only!) and everything to do with Keeping Well (because of having to sing), Very Important Rehearsals (because the gig is tomorrow) and What Shall We Sing at Midnight?

Add to that the deadline for a job I've been doing (before the end of this week) and you have, as near as dammit, the situation I used to be in when I was working. Then, in addition to the singing (remember - singers are the biggest hypochondriacs in the flu season) we tended to have exam marking to finish and the school magazine to get out before the customers started skiving in the run-up to the hols. And when I was a pupil we had the school concert - huge in Hillhead High School in the 60s, and multiplied by 4 the year the St Andrew's Halls burned down and we had to put them on in the (very much smaller) school hall on four nights one hectic week - so were trailing home after 6pm on the foggy Glasgow evenings after two hours of extra-curricular orchestral rehearsal. The choir, I remember, was never allowed to interfere with the orchestra, and had to fit rehearsals in at lunch time.

So I have never, ever, known a peacefully domestic festive season - have never understood when people have said "Just as well you caught flu/the cold/winter vomiting/bubonic plague before Christmas" - because, for me, Christmas has always come as a great "whew!" that I made it all (or didn't, as this year: I still haven't reconciled myself to the cancellation of last week's carol service). In a way, this mirrors my retirement so far - and that's where this morning's ponderings came in. Were I to chuck it all, to confine my singing to the shower (sounded great this morning) and my church activities to the pew on a Sunday; to refuse any invitation to practise my professional skills in retirement - would I turn into a placid, relaxed pensioner with time to visit friends and take little mid-week breaks in interesting cities?

Or would I simply die of boredom?

Huvtaes galore

My pal Kenny's been blogging about having a day off work, coinciding nicely with my thoughts today on what to some must seem like a life of days off - this retirement business.One of the things I joked about missing when I first stopped work was the absence of a proper "sickie" - because if you're not staying off work because you have a bug of some kind, there seems little point in actually taking to your bed for a day. No, you just slope miserably around doing things in a half-hearted sort of way that doesn't seem all that different from normal life - not the same thing at all.

But more seriously, now that I'm on my 5th year of retirement I've realised that there are people who retire properly and people who seem to miss that particular boat. I'm one of the latter group, as is Mr B. There are people who retire and find themselves without a single obligation in their lives - not a single "huvtae" to impose a deadline or produce a modicum of stress. They do what they like when they want to, and don't give it a thought: they're retired, after all. And then there's me and people like me. Ok, a lot of it's church - and I'm not talking just turning up on a Sunday. And it's not actually religious faith putting on the pressure - it's people, and the need not to let them down, and the difficulty in saying "no". Perhaps the tasks and obligations look interesting, fulfilling, even, so you say "yes" - and suddenly your life takes on the familiar structure where there are no weeks where you can see clear space of more than a day at a time.

Add to that any little job related to your past life that you take on because you know you can do it and it might be fun and anyway it'll pay for that new suite you've rashly ordered. It turns out to have a deadline and suddenly you're rushing home at 4.30pm to get a couple of hours' work on it before, domestic goddess that you are, you produce a wonderful meal. (The DG bit keeps cropping up, by the way, just as it always did when you were working - it's just that you thought you'd have more time for it and you don't)

It was, however, pointed out to me today that I'd probably be bored if I had no huvtaes. I have, after all, chosen my burdens - most of them, anyway. So I'll just carry on singing and writing and planning concerts and writing exams and blogging and preaching and attending synods and running discussion groups and performing in workshops and ... and ...

And I'll enjoy my holidays, which will still feel like holidays. And I won't ever know what boredom feels like.