You guessed it: A-level revision is under way, and giving rise to furious displacement activity.

Yes, yes, I know: it does not take every teenager this way.

I have met the other kind, too. Some find it more helpful to their revision to spend their breaks messing up the grill pan with weird snacks, creating Tate Modern exhibits out of dead drinks cans, whingeing into mobile phones or lying around in angry torpor with Jerry Springer on daytime satellite, trying not to let themselves believe that if they fail their A-levels they too will end up with big hair and a shiny shellsuit, trying to validate their existence by yelling at Jerry that their trailer-trash partner done them wrong . I realise I am lucky that it is just grill pan cleaning.

But I recognise the symptoms all too well, over the gulf of years. This wretched year-group, the most heavily examined and experimented-on generation in the history of British schooling, is doing what we all did. Revision is hateful: all that marking-time and stepping backwards, stacking up of stale facts, losing impetus and excitement in the loathsome process of consolidation, yearning for the bloody exams to be over, one way or another, and in the end hardly caring which. Jack Dee has a very funny comic routine about revision, starting with making out a revision timetable - “several hours precision ruler-work there” - and then realising that the time you have spent drawing coloured lines and boxes means that you have lost the first half-day, and therefore must start again and re-divide the work to allow for the delayed start.

It is a perennial misery, but I think it is probably even worse than usual for this lot, and not just because it is their third year running of major public exams. Increased anxiety about life and jobs is accompanied by a crumbling of trust (see also the current Reith lectures) in the examination boards . AS-level marking - notably maths, but other subjects too - did not inspire confidence. One school I know had its entire history AS-level group re-marked, and every single pupil went up at least one grade. What does that say about the examiners’ first try? The recent Edexcel shambles, after the Scottish meltdown, has been disastrous for examinees’ morale. Add to those the numerous anecdotal tales from several boards of mad grades (in both directions), slow re-marks and lost papers, and it is apparent to the most casually news-wise teenager that whatever result comes in there will be an element of luck in it.

So when you cannot stand the solitude and anxiety of revising any longer, you have a coke. Or switch on Jerry. Or clean the grill pan.

Even in my A-level term at boarding school, before the Fall, I got so restless and irritable that I smuggled large numbers of wild flowers from the convent grounds into my room, stole sugar from the dining room, and attempted to brew bluebell wine in a plastic, family-size shampoo bottle.

My friend Rosalind and I put a lot of scientific research into the recipe, but not quite enough to prevent the bottle exploding after five days and splattering the walls with purple dots. But the subsequent afternoon washing the walls down took my mind off the life of Marcus Porcius Cato and the Defenestration of Prague, and the lurking question of how much they mattered, with the sun shining outside.

So you flog on, and then come to the equally tricky decision about the last few hours before the exam itself. A couple of years ago there was some wacky research from Reading University cybernetics department, which tried to find out what worked best. Studying 200 students, the researchers found that those who watched This Morning for 30 minutes found their IQ level up by six points, whereas last-minute revision lowered it by six, making a potential full grade’s difference. A BBC2 documentary gave you four points, and Friends one point. It then went a bit off the wall - classical music, orange juice and chatting to friends scored negative, peanuts positive, and beer worked both ways, depending on the individual. Professor Warwick, who dreamed this up, concluded that watching undemanding television just before an exam “warms up the brain without stretching it too much”.

Goodness. I always thought that was what the first question was for. No wonder I got a D in Latin.