Probably not my worst failure, but
You know when you open the envelope knowing that you’ve fucked up an exam, so the result is inevitable, and yet that tiny, tiny ray of light in the gloom of your thoughts thinks that somehow, there may be a chance that you passed…possibly they confused your paper with someone else, or the marker was stoned…or…anyway, the ‘FAILED’ grade is no surprise. The ones that hurt are the ones you thought you’d passed, the ones you really tried hard for and were confident of, OK, not an ‘A’, but a decent ‘C’. When you fail those, you really feel a failure.

So anyway, my worst failure from this point of view happened when I was about 16 and had (funnily enough) failed to get off a train at the right stop. Nothing very amusing there, except the stop I missed was Paris. I thought the train would go from Gare de L’Est to Gare du Nord; it didn’t, it was heading for Brussels instead of Calais. I managed to get off at some smallish town a hundred miles or so outside Paris, it was probably called Pierreboug or something.

With not very much money at all, I decided to hitch-hike back to Paris, so I found the main road, and fairly near a sign saying something like ‘Paris 150km’, I stuck out my thumb. After a while a car stopped and the driver wound down the passenger window:

“Tu va ou?” he probably said,

“Paris”, quoth I, in my finest French accent, honed by years of ‘O’ Level study.

“Ou?” he asked,

“Paris” I repeated, he shrugged, a gallic shrug, “la capitale”, I added.

“Ah Paris” he said.

Yes, I had totally failed to make myself understood. I’ve often thought since then how badly someone would have to pronounce ‘London’ hitch-hiking on the A1 southbound for me not to understand them…
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Thu 11 Jan 2007, 10:22, Reply)