Results Day

27 August, 2009. We were on holiday in Frampton-on-Severn and today was Son No Two's GCSE Results Day...

It was a bit of a mistake we were away this week at all. I had planned to be at home so Son No Two could collect his results in person and then enrol for Sixth Form the next day. We'd booked up on the strength of a letter sent to parents in March which unfortunately had the wrong date on it. (New notifications had been sent out with the students apparently but ours never reached us - possibly still in the bottom of last term's backpack).

So I arranged for his results to be collected and then relayed to us by phone at the earliest possible moment...

We were all sat around the breakfast table in our holiday cottage, watching students collecting results on the plasma TV, with bated breath awaiting phone call, pen and paper at the ready. Suspense was building. We were lucky enough to be staying at Byres Water - a contemporary cottage which had been luxuriously converted from a traditional open fronted cow byre.

The back door opened onto a patio leading down to a one and a half acre lake complete with resident kingfisher, swans that tapped on the kitchen windows and fish that leapt out of the water for our leftover bread. There was also a rowing boat and so Son No Two decided to have a quick circuit around the lake to pass the time - one and a half minutes - his best time yet! Still no call.

I was stressing about an episode I'd had the night before. I'd been tossing and turning thinking about the next day's results when my bedside lamp turned itself on in front of my very eyes and simultaneously my mobile phone screen lit up all by itself. Could it have been a power surge or was it the power of my thoughts. Rubbish, they all laughed and said it was probably the ghost of one of the cows that used to live there...

Several more turns round the lake and we had the results! A Distinction in Media, an A and several B's - congratulations were definitely in order...

All that remained was for us to ring up school later on that afternoon to see how he could enrol for sixth form when he was miles away. He of course, spent the rest of the day on his mobile to his mates exchanging results whilst we all wandered around Bourton-on-the-Water in the nearby Cotswolds.

Incidentally, it must be the most Picture Postcard Perfect village I've ever seen with its little bridges and kids plodging in the flowing stream, cream teas and butterscotch ice-cream and the sun was shining...I was thinking -only another two years to A Level Results Day...