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WHEN I was in my late teens I feared just one stumble on the schoolcollege-career path might send me tumbling into an abyss. One rogue choice and it might be game over.

Of course, life is not like that at all. It is more of an endurance event than a sprint; more about the stumbles you right yourself from than the easy wins.

But very few people tell you that when you are aged between 15 and 18. And to be fair, even if they did, would you have listened?

This week and next, a cohort of kids whose education has been significantly disrupted by Covid lockdowns will get their GCSE and A-level results. I hope examiners and university admissions officers cut them some slack. But more importantly, I hope they cut themselves some slack and realise that if their hopes are not met fully, they have options. They can resit, defer or even just rethink: the hamster-wheel of school and college is not for everyone.

Charlie Lewis, the main character of David Nicholls’s Sweet Sorrow, is convinced, at the beginning of the novel, that he will not have the GCSE grades to continue with his education. At his leavers’ disco, a kindly teacher tries to tell him how little, in the overall scheme of things, that actually matters. ‘I mean it does matter, but not as much as you’d think.’

In contrast, the main character of Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, Charles Highway, is an entitled little so-and-so, taking a year out after acing his A-levels to sit a separate Oxford entrance exam. Despite his swagger, however, there is much that boy has to learn.

Martha, the first-person narrator of Meg Mason’s bestselling Sorrow And Bliss, comes to know the hard way that navigating life is about far more than just passing exams. In her A-level year ‘a little bomb went off in my brain’. From thereon in, the intellectually brilliant Martha has to learn to live with mental illness.

Best of luck if your children or grandchildren are awaiting results. But also remember, nobody past 25 is ever asked how they did in their GCSEs, or even A-levels.