And by passed I mean just passed. Grade 4 by the tiniest of margins. I tell myself that I am too old for exams but even I realize that that's a vile self-serving lie to let me off lightly. I just couldn't do it, maths was beyond my ken.

Still now they, the maths courses, are gone, past and passed. How do I feel? Strangely odd, I wanted to do better but that stuff was hard. I do computer stuff without much bother, when it came to maths I was always panic-threshing at something that I didn't quite get. Too often I found myself writing my TMAs drunk with music blasting and ,if my wife wasn't there, an incoherence of dancing too. I enjoyed myself and submitted pish.

Was I wrong to do maths? I can answer that with a definite no! I may not have covered myself in any glory, the pale of failure was mine but I learnt a different way to think. I thought about the way that I think.

It's ok to be an idiot, at something, for a while, as long as it helps you to be wise elsewhere. Maths did that for me.

Every thing that I will do in the rest of my life will be coloured by that fact that I had the bottle to tackle maths. Or the insights that I got there.

I failed in what I set out to do, but I am not unchanged. And perhaps to be changed was what I should have set out to be?

Things I can do well, as someone once said of Ajax, "some God gave me", maths, what I got from that I worked for. Hard and with some effort.

I'm proud of what little I know.