Fools

I've just been invigilating an exam.

 

Some of the questions asked were stupider than a fictional American tourist at the Edinburgh Festival. "What time is the 1 o'clock cannon fired?" and all of that. 

 

One question in particular seemed to baffle them, for no reason I could fathom.

 

Rather than, as usual, give you the Top 5 Howlers, I prefer to describe in full the behaviour of one of the fringe members of the group, who rather nicely encapsulates the idiocies of the rest. If he were in a wildlife documentary, he would be a wildebeest; but one of those wildebeasts lagging behind, a little slow on the uptake whilst his wildefriends scarpered, the one with the flummoxed expression, about to be devoured by the predatory lions.

 

The question they were struggling with reads as follows:

 

A friend is coming to visit Argentina for two weeks. Write a letter recommending what he could do. After a couple of minutes, a hand went up. Tomás, it seemed, was confused. 

Do I need to put an address? he asked. I said, Yes. He said he didn't know his address. I said, Make it up. 

He sat there for many minutes, before writing

Buenos Aires.

in the top right corner.

Returning to my desk, no sooner had I started my marking before, out of the peripheries of my vision a little but now familiar hand go up again. 

Yes, Tomás? I ventured. Sir, what is the date? I pointed to what he had just written on the exam paper - 12th November - next to the word Date. Ah yes, he said, like some kind of academic who'd experienced a Joycean moment of epiphany.  

I returned to my desk. A minute or so later, the hand went up again. Confidently. 

 

Sir, can I invent a name? Which may actually have been rhetorical. I said, Yes. This time I waited by his desk, morbidly fascinated by where this would go. 

Once again, he sat there for an apparent eternity - like Oscar Wilde agonising over whether to add or remove a comma - before writing:

Dear Friend,

Reading this, I affirmed that he could invent a name. 

Yes, Sir, said Tomás, and then added, rather cryptically, I thought of one. 

Tomás continued: 

Dear Friend. 

It's Christian here. Your friend. 

Unfortunately the test was only half an hour, and that's as far as he, and the comedy, got. Pens down. 

Ah, the disappointment on his face. The genius he was about to unleash.