The Retirement Newsletter: My last set of summer exams

Issue Number: -37 — What’s the big deal?

Photo by Author — Summertime and living is easy — apart from those pesky exams

Welcome

Welcome to issue -37 — my last set of summer exams.

This week is about summer exams, Bluebells in my local woods, and looking back at an unplanned ski trip I took to the States a few years ago.

Summer Exams

Summer exams have been a big part of my life since I was 12, and some 50 years later, they are still part of my life. In my mid-twenties to early thirties, there was a brief window of about ten years in which they weren’t part of my life, and at the time, I didn’t realise that summer exams would come back at a later stage of my career.

The first summer exam I can remember sitting was when I was at school. We had the dreaded summer exams to determine how our year had gone and which classes we would be streamed to the following year. It was a big deal.

At 15, I sat my first ‘public’ exam — maths. I was good at maths and took my ‘O level’ (Ordinary Level Examination — a UK exam, now deceased and replaced with the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education)) a year early.

The following year I took the rest of my ‘O levels’.