“What do you think is the greatest threat to the planet, and why?” I ask my 16-year-old.
“Earthquakes. Because buildings fall. And this causes animals to die.”
“Seriously?”
“I am absolutely serious, yes.”
“You don’t think the climate crisis is a more big peril?”
“I do not.”
“Are there any other menaces you can think of?”
“I sometimes worry that there is plastic in the water.”
We are conducting this conversation in French, while prepping for a GCSE oral exam the following day. Half of me is freaking the hell out, and the other half is thinking it can’t possibly go as badly as my friend’s kid’s German oral. She was asked whether she liked to read, and said that, yes, she liked to read many books. Then she was asked what she was reading, and panicked, and said: “Mein Kampf.”
In 1989, during my exam, I was asked: “If you had Aids, would you have children?” They weren’t being deliberately provocative – this was before “HIV positive” was the normal formulation. And fair enough, I guess they wanted to know whether I could use the subjunctive. But the answer was no, I couldn’t, so I said: “I do have Aids, and I will have children.” Then I described at length all the things children do, in the present continuous: “They are playing, they are saying funny things, and I like that.”
A friend was asked whether a French protester was right to drive his tractor into a McDonald’s that was under construction, thereby demolishing it. It was a very complex situation, politically – was he a fascist or an anti-capitalist? His possession of heavy machinery would put him on the right in the UK, but the taxonomy of French fascism might not be the same as ours, and anyway, why did he choose a McDonald’s? Grappling with these conundrums as well asthe foreign language fried my friend’s brain circuitry, unfortunately, and she can’t remember what she said. All she can say for certain is that she survived.
And now it’s 12.03pm, and the 16-year-old is three minutes in to the exam. If the stars align, they’ll be asking him what pets he has, and he’ll be talking about his fantasy iguana, but will almost certainly have forgotten the word for “iguana”, having only learned it 12 hours ago. And it won’t be the end of the world, because this is torture, and everyone screws it up, and everyone survives.
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Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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