Sluice me down, it's results day

When you read this, it will be exactly one week to the day of reckoning.

Exam board officials will be rubbing their hands together with sadistic glee and I will be an indistinguishable puddle of despair somewhere public, being sluiced off the pavement and transferred to the nearest waste disposal receptacle so that innocent pedestrians need not accidentally step in my gloom.

I've lost all feeling in my limbs just thinking about it.

I've also been thinking a lot recently about The Big Breakfast, that late, great feat of programming that married laminated kitchen tablecloths and Chris Evans's ego with the feigned pretence that Kelly Brook was interested in current affairs.

Not that I am pining for days spent haunted by the fear of Keith Chegwin on one's doorstep before 9am, you understand, or even harbouring resentment towards my parents for never entering us as Family of the Week (precious exposure that surely would have resulted in my being 'discovered' and subsequently given all the jobs Peaches "Yar, war is, like, bad" Geldof has been massacring ever since).

No, I have been thinking solely about that one mid-August morning every year when a gaggle of ashen-faced teenagers would be bullied into sitting round a big pine table eating toast and marmalade as Denise Van Outen revealed their A-level results to the world.

Toast and marmalade that would most likely be regurgitated minutes afterwards in the toilets of Lock Keeper's Cottage because the poor darling hasn't got the required grades to study Classics at Bristol, and must instead go into the family keycutting business with their cousin Brian.

Watching as a blissfully ignorant tweenie, when academic appraisal came in the form of smiley stickers and the odd end of term disco, this charade seemed great fun.

Now I look back on the memory as Shaun the sheep might regard a doner kebab.

Or, come to think of it, as anyone might regard a doner kebab '“ with morbid curiosity and a distinct wave of nausea.

How? Why? What, other than large sums of money and the chance to make snide jokes around Richard Bacon, would possess anyone to put themselves through the modern equivalent of public witch-dunking?

Perhaps the appeal was the chance to escape the clutches of fond mamas for a minute or two, a desire I can fully identify with in my current state; so sick am I of hearing people tell me it'll all be fine that I'm finding myself quite attracted to the idea of coming home with an envelope full of Ds, just to say 'Ha'*.

Escape route from college has been planned in minute detail on that blueprint paper they have in films (effort that, in hindsight, would have been far more effectively employed in revising for the dratted things in the first place), so that in the event of abject failure on the day, all well-meaning friends waving pages of As in my tearful face can be avoided like the bird flu.

And thence onward, to acquire a nice bit of body piercing or facial tattoo ("Don't Ask" across the forehead might be particularly useful) just to confirm I have officially gone off the proverbial rails, in case anyone's mum might ask.

My friends and I have become wildly superstitious in the way that only students and elderly ladies can be.

Any kind of pre-results preparation for uni is stupid beyond question, just tempting an enormous hand to descend from the clouds, snatch us up and drop us in the doorway of the local jobcentre whilst a voice echoes "OH? Think you've PASSED then, do you?"

Which is why the reading list UCL sent several weeks ago is submerged under a pile of dusty Vogues to prevent it creeping out and blighting my entire future.

Even the traditional 'touching wood' has evolved into an agitated ritual dance involving the slapping of all tree-descended materials in the vicinity, followed by the heads of those around us and then our own.

The end result is something vaguely like the New Zealand rugby team routine, only steeped in adolescent angst rather than Maori history.

Still, it helps.

Perhaps a nice slice of toast and marmalade would heal the pain'¦where's Johnny Vaughan when you need him?

*Please note that the above statement was nothing more than a flippant remark, and any reader who might possibly have access to my results sheet should by no means take it upon themselves to get happy with a Biro.