I don’t know what you got in your A-levels, if you happened to take any, but I got two As and a B (English, History and Music). I’m not telling you this because I expect you to give a flying toss, but because it partly explains why the news that one in ten of those sitting A-levels this year managed to bag three As nettles me slightly. You can have all the intellectual equality you like, so long as there isn’t a top ten percent I’m not in. Go on, tell me they’ve got easier; I’m listening…

A-levels were a bit silly (in the sense of ridiculously demanding) when I took them, and I get the impression they’ve got sillier since. There was and is a lot of work involved, a lot of coursework to be handed in, for the sake of a decidedly narrow evaluation of one’s achievements. IT thinks that posh schools like the one I went to spend all their time furiously coaching pupils to meet the various “assessment criteria” on which success is founded; strangely enough, this is what I imagine goes on at most comprehensives, with about as much first-hand experience to base my opinion on. It’s a perennial fantasy: children at the (state) primary school I went to, knowing that my parents were teachers, used to attribute my precocious manner to the fact that I must get extra lessons at home, endless spelling tests and comprehension exercises over the breakfast table (and perhaps I did - but disguised as something else…). I am naturally brilliant; you are well-educated; he/she/it was remorselessly drilled by joyless automatons. But whatever the pedagogical regime, A-levels are for most people who take them (so far as I can tell in both state and private education) a genuine intellectual challenge; I’d like to tell you that I breezed through mine without breaking into a sweat, but actually I still have anxiety dreams about unfinished composition coursework.

(The anxiety dream goes like this: it is about three weeks before exams, and I am doing brilliantly in English and History. The reason I am doing brilliantly, however, is that I have failed to turn up for a single lesson in Music. Not only have I not completed any composition coursework, I have also neglected to learn anything whatsoever about the history of opera, the development of tonality, or how to do the harmonies for Bach chorales without putting in any fucking parallel fifths. There are many, many sonatas and symphonies I ought to have listened to, and have not; I know nothing of the leitmotifs of Der Meistersinger or the thematic development of Die Freischütz (or is it Die Meistersinger and Der Frieschütz? Fuck!); I have no idea why Fidelio’s supposed to be such a big deal. All the time I should have spent on these and many other things I have spent doing really well at English and History. I am going to get As in English and History, hooray! But I am going to fail at music, and two A-levels, even really good ones, are not enough. Anyone could get two As if they only had to do two A-levels. Some people do four!!! even though the fourth one’s usually General Studies, which doesn’t count, or Further Maths, which is just taking unfair advantage of one’s freakishly numerate brain; it’s not like you can do Further English after all, although I’d definitely get an A in that if you could - I bet I could write a really good essay on Nabokov. Perhaps the situation can be rescued if I cram a whole lot of stuff in really quickly. But that will mean going to the music department, and explaining why I haven’t showed up there for over a year and a half, and sheepishly asking them to explain which of the German and Italian augmented sixths is which. I’d really rather read another Jane Austen and pretend it isn’t happening…)

Incidentally, looking at the 2008 syllabus for Further Maths, I reckon I could probably hack it now. I was a bit put off by doing the “AO” exam at age 16, which was a significant leap beyond GCSE, and the difficulty of which persuaded me that I’d reached the limit of my natural abilities; but while natural ability helps you zoom ahead at a young age, and is probably essential if you’re going to do any serious work as a mathematician, it’s possible when there are no exams looming to take things slowly, fall back when you run into difficulties, and gradually get to know about an area that interests you - and it feels great.