Surprise!

I like surprises. Not so much the kind of surprise where someone turns up on your doorstep at eight o'clock on a Saturday morning with croissants but more the ones that are like "Wait until you see what I've bought you!" or "I'm just going to have to put this blindfold on you for a minute."

What I very much don't like is the kind of surprise that is going to change your life, for good or for bad. Like 'A' level results. One of my daughters has her results coming in the morning and I remember just how much I hated that. Standing there, holding the envelope (which is how results arrived in my day), knowing that your fate was already sealed within but, like Schrodinger's Cat, not actually part of your reality until you opened the envelope.

Ah, 'A' levels: how can it be fair that your hard work over two years can be judged by a paper that itself might be judged as being a difficult or bad paper? Of course, 'A' levels have always had an exam element but I'd like to be moving away from that. (I'm glad that there are very few people who impact my life with whom I find myself almost invariably at odds but Michael Gove is one of them. I am strongly in favour of continuous assessment and I loathe exams.)

But we are where we are and thus Izzy was on tenterhooks all day and has been for a while. She didn't want to be on her own, today, obsessing with her thoughts about possible futures, so she came down with me to meet @artminx to pick up the gift in the photo, which she had drawn for a friend of mine, whom I was seeing later on this evening for a birthday celebration.

Mind you, that was a stressful surprise, too: the drawing was beautiful but I wondered if he would like it. Happily, he did!