If the exams were stressful, half-term is worse

I am sure my children have done some revision in the last three weeks, even though I was never able to catch them at it. Whenever I ran across the middle one, I found him playing Fifa 16 while also texting people. I occasionally saw the youngest one, and I sometimes saw his books, but never together.

Once the exams start happening, it’s all too late. On the first morning, I wake to the sound of my wife shrieking at the youngest one who is, I gather, being a bit relaxed about his schedule: He’s watching TV. My wife is still yelling when I get downstairs.

“If you miss your exam, that’s it!” she screams.

“I’m not going to miss my exam,” he says, changing the channel.

“Why are you even here?” she says. “Why aren’t you at the bus stop?”

“Because the next bus doesn’t come for 23 minutes,” he says. I have learned never to argue with my children about buses, because they have apps — they know where all the buses are. My wife is not so easily put off.

“Why aren’t you on the bus before that one?” she yells, before storming out of the room. The boy rolls his eyes.

“Get in the car,” I say.

I drive until we overtake the previous bus, and then pull over at its next stop to let him out.

“Please try to look more stressed out for your mother’s sake,” I say.

“I will,” he says.

Every afternoon, one or the other of them comes home with an expectation-managing summary of the day’s testing.

“It was universally thought to be an extremely difficult paper,” the middle one says on Tuesday.

“No one I talked to answered the last question,” the youngest one says on Wednesday.

On Thursday, the middle one attends an all-day revision session at school and comes back looking suspiciously sunburnt. The youngest arrives later, after doing two exams in the same day.

“The first one went OK,” he says.

Then half-term arrives and everything stops. I would say it’s like the eye of a hurricane, except I’ve been in the eye of a hurricane and the forbidding calm lasts, like, 20 minutes. I’m not sure I can take a whole week of it.

On Friday, the youngest one turns 17, and we all go to a restaurant for lunch. I am restless and absent-minded, unable to follow the conversation.

“One of you has to soak up your father,” my wife says. “He’s staring into space again.”

“I was thinking about the unification of Italy,” I say. “From 1815 to 1870.” Actually I’m staring out the window at a man washing his car. The unification of Italy is the subject of a paperback study guide that has lain untouched on our stairs for a fortnight.

“He’s missing his puzzle,” my wife says. I was in the middle of the crossword when we left the house and made a fuss about not being allowed to bring it along.

“Actually, puzzles are a good way to keep your brain from dying,” the middle one says.

“We should all be doing puzzles this week,” I say.

“Uh-huh,” the youngest says.

“Or gardening,” I say. “We could go back and do some gardening now.”

“No,” the youngest says.

“We could plant some seeds,” I say.

“No,” the middle one says.

“Then we could go online and order more seeds,” I say.

“Then we could wait for those seeds to arrive,” the youngest says. When he was small he used to make a little face to indicate that he was making fun of me, but now his gaze is flat, his expression unreadable. It’s much more effective.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Tim Dowling is a Guardian journalist.