How to Fail

I was arrogant about my driving test. Not because I thought I was an exceptional driver – I really, really wasn’t and my lack of spatial awareness means I can still barely parallel park – but because I thought success in tests was a perfect equation of effort multiplied by intelligence equals reward. I also knew that all my family – mother, father and older sister – had passed their test first time. In fact, my sister was a driver of such skill that later she took an Advanced Driving Test in order to qualify for lower insurance premiums and a lifetime of making all her romantic partners feel slightly emasculated (she’s also an excellent map-reader, motorcyclist, pilot and shooter of rifles, having once represented her country in precisely this sport. My cousins, not without reason, call her Jane Bond).

Being the youngest in a high-achieving family means you’re left scrabbling to keep up. In many ways, this was a gift – it gave me determination and a die-hard work ethic. In other ways, it meant I was more likely to take it to heart when I failed in areas that my parents or sister had already succeeded.

So it was with the driving test. Having done twenty lessons with long-suffering Bob, my driving instructor and a man blessed with the innate calmness and patience of a Buddhist monk, I felt wholly prepared. I had passed my theory test after swotting up on motorway lights and highway road signs. All that was left was the practical element – and how hard could that be?

Pretty hard, as it turned out.

I was paired with a stern-faced female examiner, the sort of person whose head seemed to have been chipped off an Easter Island statue, except less expressive. She was impervious to any effort at small talk or charm. Well, that’s fine, I thought, I’ll just drive brilliantly and she’ll be forced to crack a smile by the end.

For the first twenty minutes, everything went according to plan. I can honestly say, with the benefit of over two decades of driving cars, that it was quite possibly the best bit of driving I have ever done. Three-point turns were executed seamlessly. The emergency stop was deftly handled. Roundabouts held no fear. I indicated with grace, checked my wing mirrors as if born to the task and bowled smoothly along the roads trailed by songbirds whistling a merry tune.

Then, on our return to the test centre, the instructor motioned that I should go up a steep hill. I chuckled to myself. Hill starts were my forte. I’d learned to drive in Malvern, which is renowned for two things: its spring water and its gradients. Back at home in Ireland, we lived at the bottom of a valley. Navigating inclines was a way of life.

The car chuntered up to the brow of the hill. At the top, there was a traffic light and a column of cars waiting to turn into the main road. I slowed, stopped and pulled on the handbrake with full force. But then – calamity! – the car rolled back. It was just a few centimetres, and I stopped before hitting the car behind, but I already knew this was an automatic fail. Despite the blemish-free drive up to this point, I was going to be judged on this single moment of not-good-enough.

I drove back to the test centre and saw Bob, peering hopefully at me from the car park. I gave him a shake of the head and could tell he was already gearing up to say it can’t have been that bad.

The examiner turned to me, un-clicked her seatbelt and uttered the words ‘I regret to inform you …’ as if she were a telegram boy delivering news of a dead soldier on the Western Front. I slumped out of the car and Bob patted me on the arm and said it was just a bit of bad luck. He drove me back to school, where I used up what was left of my BT charge card to wail down the phone at my mother, who was nonplussed by my disproportionately melodramatic reaction.

‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘You can take the test again. Plenty of people do.’

She was right, of course. It was simply that by failing this test, the persona I’d built for myself based on passing exams came crumbling down. It dawned on me, as if for the first time, that perhaps I wasn’t guaranteed a pass through life purely because I was good at getting ‘A’s or because my parents had invested money in helping me to do so.

When I interviewed the memoirist and journalist Dolly Alderton for the podcast, she had a similar experience when she failed to get into Bristol University. Like me, she had been lucky enough to be sent to a private school, something that struck her as ‘the most wildly unfair thing in the world’.

‘I’m not an academic person,’ she said. ‘I was pretty lazy, and I came out with tremendous results that 100 per cent I wouldn’t have got had I not been at a private school. I truly believe and know that in my heart, because it’s actually really hard to be a failure at private school because you’re paying this extraordinary amount of money to be in these tiny classes, normally, to have a huge amount of time and focus and resources spent on you.

‘I think it’s so unfair that a girl like me, who would have just completely fallen through the cracks, I think, in any other schooling environment, manages to have these great opportunities and excel in a way that isn’t artificial, but was very much supported at every baby step of the way.’

Alderton passed her GCSEs, managing to get a C in Maths ‘even though it seemed like that was the most impossible thing’ and sailed through her schooling so that by the time it came to applying to universities, she was blessed with ‘this rock solid assurance that everything is going to be really easy in life, which I suppose is entitlement’.

When Bristol rejected her, ‘I just didn’t believe it. That’s the extent of how little I had faced failure in my life. Everything that I tried, my parents ploughed money in and time in to make sure that I just dragged my feet through it. Whether it was a ballet exam or getting into this boarding school for sixth form. Or my Maths GCSE. I just hadn’t experienced failure.

‘But yeah, it was a good lesson to me because it made me acknowledge the extent of my privilege and the curious and unfair and unusual education that I had. And to acknowledge that and realise that that’s not what the real world was going to be like.

‘And maybe it’s not just exclusive to people who were privately schooled, maybe it’s a sort of adolescent arrogance as well. But what a good lesson to learn!’

It is. Alderton ended up going to Exeter, so it’s not exactly an unremitting tale of woe. Nor was my driving-test failure. A few weeks went past, and I sat my test again. I had been randomly allotted the same examiner. The absurdity seemed to me so great that my nerves actually dissipated.

Interestingly, because I’d already failed and faced the entirely self-imposed indignity of that failure, I was liberated from my own expectations. My family now knew I was a rubbish driver, I thought, so there was no need to worry about letting anyone down. Besides, maybe continuing to fail my driving test over the coming years would become a loveable character quirk and I’d develop a hitherto untapped ditziness that people would find funny and charming.

So I embarked on my second driving test in a pleasant fog of couldn’t-give-a-shit-ness. I made legions of minor errors. I could see the instructor jotting them down on her clipboard and I still didn’t care. This time, when it came to the hill start, I glided smoothly away without any rollback but the minor errors kept piling up until her sheet of paper became blackened with tiny vertical hyphens.

I returned to the test centre and waited for the examiner to deliver the bad news.

‘I’m pleased to say …’ she started and I knew I’d passed.

The biggest lesson I took from it all was that the secret to succeeding at tests is not, actually, to get a fantastic mark. Succeeding at a test means not defining yourself according to the outcome. It means reminding yourself that you exist separately from those ticks in the margin and that most of life is an arbitrary collision of serendipitous or random events and no one is awarding you percentage points for how you live it.

Since then, I have tried to adopt this mindset, of someone who has made the effort to understand who they really are, what they care about and what their values are rather than what grades they think they deserve. After all, the person awarding those grades might simply be having a bad day or might not agree with what you believe about Prospero’s role in The Tempest or whether you think Richard III really did kill the Princes in the Tower (it was definitely Henry Tudor). But that doesn’t mean you’re a failure as a person.

Of course, that is not to say exams are unimportant. They are. They give you discipline and focus. Good results can be a conduit to a more expansive life with greater opportunities. They can get you into universities and fulfilling careers and they can give you confidence in your own abilities. I’m not one of those people who, every year when A-level results come out, takes to social media to pontificate pompously about how none of it really counts and, hey kids, I left school with an E in Snail Breeding and Advanced Crochet Work, but look at me now – I’m a C-list reality TV star with 120,000 followers on Twitter and a boohoo.com clothing line. No, I think exams are important. But I also think we need to keep them in perspective. No one deserves to pass a test simply because they believe they’re entitled to a positive result. Nor are we wholly defined by exams; it’s just that working hard and doing well at them can occasionally help us get to where we want to be.

And sometimes, if we don’t end up where we’d planned or we’re forced to confront the humiliation of a failed science exam or an undead bat flying around a classroom, it can make us understand all of the above.

That is its own kind of success.

How to Fail at Your Twenties

I got into Cambridge University. I did well at my exams there too, having fallen into the habit of doing everything I could to achieve the best grades. I enjoyed my time at Cambridge because, true nerd that I am, I loved my subject and geeked out reading Plato and studying war memorials and writing essays with linking words such as ‘nevertheless’ which I thought made me sound intelligent (I was wrong).

I also met my best friend, Emma. She was standing in the corner of the college bar one evening in freshers’ week. A half-Swedish blonde-haired sexpot, she wore a slogan T-shirt with ‘One for the rogue’ emblazoned across the front and was holding a pint in one hand. Inevitably, she was surrounded by a gaggle of slavering men who could barely keep their tongues from flopping out of their teenage mouths.

Whoever that is, I thought as I walked in and ordered my old lady gin and tonic, we are so not going to get on. At first glance, Emma looked like one of the popular girls I had lived in fear of since the days of Siobhan. But then one of the men I knew vaguely from halls beckoned me over and introduced us, and Emma looked straight at me, ignored all the guys trying desperately to get her attention, and started quoting dialogue from the Austin Powers film. She turned out to be so incredibly funny and so disarmingly unaware of her own gorgeousness that, right then and there, I fell in platonic love.

Emma has the most darkly hilarious sense of humour I’ve ever encountered, and it’s so unexpected because she looks so sweet and pretty when you first meet her, and also because later in life, she became a psychotherapist and a very seriously successful person. The contradiction is part of her considerable charm. In our final year at university, we lived together in student rooms. We used to have friends over for ad-hoc dinners, although because we had no kitchen, we were severely limited in what we could offer in terms of food (most of the time it was guacamole, I seem to remember). Emma and I washed the dishes in the bathroom basin, and left them to dry on the window-sill, which meant that occasionally we’d be awoken by a dramatic crashing sound as soap-sudded plates slipped off the ledge and ricocheted into the alley below. I truly hope no passerby was ever injured, but I cannot guarantee it.

After graduating, I upgraded to a place with a kitchen and lived in a house-share in Clapham, along with approximately 98 per cent of nicely spoken, middle-class recent graduates hoping for a career in the media or management consultancy.

In my imagination, after the success of my university years, this was going to be a halcyon period of my young adulthood. I had been an inveterate fan of the 1990s TV drama This Life, which followed the lives and loves of twenty-something lawyers who sported cool hair and cracked jokes like pistachio shells. On This Life, everyone slept with each other and drank together and smoked in their house with the windows closed because there was no one to tell them not to.

I thought my twenties were going to be spent in similarly low-lit bedrooms, where I would burn a perfectly judged stick of soft jasmine incense and have a great piece of contemporary art casually slung on the wall. In the mornings, I would be hungover from the wild night before, but hungover in a messily attractive way, like a girl in a music video with tousled hair.

I would get up and make myself an espresso even though I didn’t really like espresso and I would sit at the communal kitchen table and laugh throatily at some clever comment made by one of my handsome male house-mates, who was probably in love with me but couldn’t admit it yet.

I would scrawl witty reminders of our weekly house dinners on Post-it notes that I would stick on the fridge, which would only ever contain bottles of champagne, vodka, gel eye masks and a tub of low-fat cottage cheese and then I would leave for work, wearing high heels and a silk blouse and a tailored skirt, and probably designer shades because I could afford them now that I’d paid off my student loan and, besides, it was going to be perpetually sunny in my twenties.

That, at least, was the plan.

The reality didn’t quite match up.

The house in Clapham was lovely, as were my house-mates (one girl and two boys, none of whom was in love with me, unforgivably) and the rent was absurdly low. My room was on the top floor and had a sloping ceiling and a window looking onto the back gardens of the next-door street. I felt like James Stewart in my favourite film, Rear Window. Except without a cast on my leg. And without witnessing a murder. Apart from that, though, totally the same.

In other ways, my twenties did not live up to the hype. I had envisaged an age of carefree light-spiritedness, in which I would finally be able to do what I wanted in both work and play. All the hard stuff – exams, finals, student foam parties – was over, I thought. Now I’d finally be able to forge my own path and spend my own money, free of the chafing restrictions of family, school or university.

But what actually happened was that I had a hard time balancing all the various aspects of my life and my identity, which (although I didn’t realise it at the time) was still very much in the process of forming. My twenties were a constant juggle between adult responsibility and youthful impulse and often I felt as though I was failing in both areas.

The house-share, for instance, should have been fun. And sometimes it was. But I spent too much time worrying about trying to be a grown-up. I had a long-term boyfriend, and he frequently stayed over and ate absurd amounts of food, so that soon I had to factor him into my grocery shopping. This being the heyday of Jamie Oliver, I decided I would be the kind of person who was good at cooking, so at weekends, I made roast lunches but would generally put far too much salt and oil on everything in the mistaken belief that it made it somehow ‘Mediterranean’. In the spirit of improvisation, I once roasted a tray of broccoli florets. They emerged from the oven desiccated and sad-looking, and when we ate them, they tasted of charred grass and I realised there was a reason no one had done this before.

That was the thing about my twenties: it was meant to be a decade of experimentation, but sometimes the experiments taught you nothing other than that you shouldn’t have done it in the first place. Yet all around me, everyone else seemed to be having a wild time experimenting with drink, drugs and sexual partners, and I felt I should be doing the same. There was a pressure to conform to the tidal wave of non-conformity.

But the thing was, I had a full-time job to be getting on with.

I was lucky enough to have graduated with a job offer in place from the Evening Standard, where I had a spot on the Londoner’s Diary, a gossip column that liked to pretend it wasn’t really a gossip column by carrying acerbically hilarious items about politicians and Radio 4 presenters and big-name novelists rather than the TV celebrities they perceived to be more low-rent. A lot of my job involved going to parties and sidling up to famous people I’d never met before, then asking them an impertinent question designed to make an entertaining titbit for the next day’s paper.

‘Oh how fun,’ people would generally say when I told them. And I would reply that yes, yes it was and then I’d regale them with the time I met Stephen Fry at the Cannes Film Festival or the occasion on which I’d told Kate Winslet my house-mate kept rewinding the bits in her biopic of Iris Murdoch where she went swimming naked in the river (she looked taken aback, which is understandable given that the film is an emotionally draining tale of one of our finest modern writers’ descent into the ravages of Alzheimer’s. The naked swimming was very much an incidental thing).

But although I got to go to extraordinary parties and premieres and meet famous people, my job wasn’t actually that fun. For one thing, I’m a natural introvert and walking into glamorous parties on my own, not knowing anyone but feeling totally convinced everyone else knew each other, was pretty nerve-wracking. I’d have to psych myself up beforehand, and remind myself of my mother’s wise words that ‘no one is looking at you as much as you think they are’. I’d grab a glass of champagne as soon as I could so that I’d look like I was doing something, and then I’d skulk by the wall trying to seem as if I were expecting my date to turn up momentarily.

My friends also charitably assumed I was constantly being propositioned by famous people.

‘I bet it’s a total shag-fest,’ one of my house-mates said when I fell through the front door at 2 a.m. on a weeknight, having just been to the Lord of the Rings premiere where it was impossible to get to Orlando Bloom through the fire-breathing dwarves dressed like hobbits.

‘It really isn’t,’ I said but I think everyone believed I was being terribly discreet. In truth, I never slept with anyone I met through work and no one I’ve ever interviewed has tried to come on to me, except maybe once, many years later, when the flirtation was conducted over email. The famous actor in question was filming on Australia’s Gold Coast (good tax breaks, apparently) and would regale me with long anecdotes involving running along the beach and quoting T. S. Eliot to himself. Nothing ever came of it. You simply can’t date a man who tells you all about his exercise regime in excruciating detail and then quotes post-modern poetry in the same sentence.

Anyway, at parties, I’m one of those people whose resting face assumes an unwittingly haughty expression. During the Londoner’s Diary phase, this meant no one ever approached me.

Eventually, I’d spot someone who bore a passing resemblance to a man who might or might not have been the reality TV star who tried to survive for a year on a remote Scottish island or a woman who might or might not have been the It-girl daughter of a famous father who did something in construction, and I would take a deep breath and bowl over and ask them who they thought was going to be the next James Bond. This was my fail-safe question, because the British are incomprehensibly obsessed with who is going to be the next James Bond and whatever anyone said was deemed newsworthy.

Most of the time, celebrities were nice to me. Pierce Brosnan and his wife were absolutely lovely when I met them at a film awards ceremony and I have never forgotten it, even though the entirety of our exchange ran something like this:

Me: ‘So, Pierce, can I ask – who do you think will be the next James Bond?’

Pierce: ‘Oh, you can’t ask me that!’

Pierce Brosnan’s wife: ‘I like your tuxedo.’

Me: ‘OHMIGOD THANK YOU SO MUCH THAT’S SO NICE OF YOU.’

Others were less patient. At a red-carpet film premiere in Leicester Square, I commented on the suaveness of a male actor’s suit as he walked past.

‘I’m here promoting my film and all you can ask about is what I’m wearing?’ he said, spitting out the words in a fit of pique. To which I should have responded, ‘Mate, that’s what women get asked all the time, I’m just levelling the playing field.’ But I didn’t. Instead, I flushed furiously and felt humiliated and left without seeing the film.

The truth was, at the age of twenty-two, I didn’t have enough confidence in myself or my own opinions not to let incidents like this get to me. My sense of self was unmoored, at the mercy of any passing gust of wind. This was the age where my people-pleasing kicked in to a higher gear. Like many young women, I mistakenly thought that the best way of feeling better about myself was to get other people to like me and to attempt to survive on the fumes of their approbation.

For someone who spent her twenties in a series of long-term relationships this was terrible logic. I would contort myself into varying degrees of discomfort simply to fit in with someone else’s life, someone else’s desires. It got to the stage that if a boyfriend asked me where I wanted to go for lunch, I became paralysed by indecision. I didn’t want to tell them where I wanted to go in case they preferred somewhere else. After a few years of this, I genuinely no longer knew what I wanted to eat anyway and so actively needed someone else to make the decision.

I lost myself in the rush to be part of a couple.

As a result, I was scared by the notion of not being in a relationship. The longest I was single between the ages of nineteen and thirty-six was two months. In those two months, I came up with every excuse I could to keep in touch with my ex-boyfriend, and simultaneously tried to distract myself by saying yes to any man who crossed my path and expressed even the mildest interest (years later, when I told a male friend of mine about this period in my life, he replied with ‘Fuck. I wish I’d known you had no standards back then,’ which wasn’t exactly what I meant, but it wasn’t far off either).

During these eight weeks, I engineered the least spontaneous one-night stand in the history of random hook-ups, purely because I believed that having a one-night stand was exactly the sort of thing I should be experiencing in my twenties.

The man in question was called Mike and lived in Paris but had come to London for the weekend. We spent an evening eating overly complicated Chinese food served on wooden platters and then we danced in a terrible basement club off Oxford Street that only played salsa music and had stains on the walls that looked like faecal matter. Mike was perfectly nice but had the unfortunate quality of becoming less attractive the more time I spent with him because he said things like ‘Golly gosh’ and ‘Is that the time? Best be getting on then.’ But so intent was I on having this much-lauded sexual experience of no-strings-attached, shirt-rippingly intense bodily contact with a near-stranger, that I insisted on going back to his hotel and falling into bed with him. It was, hands-down, the worst sex of my life. At one point, I had to ask ‘Are you in?’ because amidst the fumbling-golly-gosh embarrassment of it all I honestly couldn’t tell.

As soon as it was over (he had, it turned out, been ‘in’) I gathered up my clothes, locked myself in the bathroom and got dressed.