Life O'Level
A Hermit Crab Fiction by Chris Cottom
OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE
SCHOOLS EXAMINATION BOARD
General Certificate Examination
Ordinary Level
LIFE
Time allowed: three score years and ten
Answer ALL questions
1. Dress your Action Man in the gold lamé ballgown of your sister’s Barbie, accessorise with a one-inch AK-47, and give your teddies a tea party to remember. List the issues facing your psychotherapist.
2. Which lasted longer?
a) The Hundred Years War.
b) The period between Christmas and your birthday.
c) Your sister getting ready for a night out.
d) Your dad using eleven Landranger OS maps to plot your holiday route, allowing for roadworks on the North Orbital and queues at the Happy Eater outside Kettering.
3. Calculate the area of your bum-fluffed chin that your sister calls Zit City.
4. If Girl A (Carol) brings her friend Girl B (Fiona) to Turner’s party, what is the probability, to the nearest fumble, that you will snog neither of them? Show your workings.
5. Write a sonnet comparing Orla, the golden-haired Irish girl you’re in love with, either to a summer’s day, or a chilly evening in late March.
6. Discuss the dichotomy facing a hypothetical unemployed man lambasted for lack of moral and economic fibre by the father of his pregnant golden-haired girlfriend, at the same time as her mother is slipping her a wad of fifties in the kitchen.
7. Represent, in a medium of your choice, the known former lovers of your fiancée, Orla. [The examiners will award extra marks for artwork which self-destructs on the morning of your wedding.]
8. Write an essay on one of the following for your five-year-old daughter.
a) The historical precedent for Playmobil princesses discarding their wimples and donning armour.
b) Endearments to shout at French people, like ‘Remember Agincourt, matey?’
c) Why boiling oil is a battlement essential for a serious re-enactment but best not to tell Mummy.
9. At what point will a graph of mortgage payments on a semi in Morden intersect with your pathological need to tell your Audit Senior precisely where to stick his double-entry bookkeeping?
10. What form of energy best describes the relationship between increased consumer demand for a ‘real summer holiday this year’ and an inelastic bank account?
a) Radiant.
b) Nuclear.
11. Explain, in words of one syllable, the impact of zero-hours contracts on discretionary household expenditure.
12. What is the term for the distance across a marital bed of nineteen years?
a) An arm’s length.
b) A glacier.
c) A road less travelled.
13. Add a handful of hyperbole to describe the stew in your stomach and the clench of your buttocks as you nod at Orla’s new husband, Jean-Pierre, at your grandson’s christening.
14. Create one or more of the following. You may use hindsight.
a) A map of your life showing dead-end jobs, wrong turnings, and borders crossed.
b) A bar chart of your marriage: its highs and lows, and that steady baseline you took for granted.
c) A watercolour of early morning Morden sunshine catching the gold of Orla’s hair.
15. When time is up and Orla visits you at your care home, put down your pen, hand her your answer sheet, and tell her how much you still have to learn about life.
This story won first prize in the 2024 WestWord Hermit Crab Prize.
Author: Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield. His stories have been published by Cosmic Daffodil, Ellipsis Zine, Flash 500, Hysteria, Leicester Writes, NFFD NZ, NFFD UK, On The Premises, One Wild Ride, Oxford Flash Fiction, Retreat West, Shooter Flash, The Centifictionist, The Hooghly Review, The Phare, The Storms, Witcraft, and others.
Unique; a great read, amusing and erudite.
Fabulous story!