IS any gerbil safe? The cat's nine lives could be about to run out. And may God help the goldfish... Just as the exam season cranks up into top gear, the authority that sets GCSE and A-levels, has produced a sliding scale for stress and allowances that can be made.

So if a parent dies just before the exam, the student gets an extra five per cent, a distant relative four per cent. If they have a distressing experience on the day of the exam, they get an extra three per cent. And if a pet dies that's worth two per cent.

Well, it could make some desperate students look at the family pet in a whole new light couldn't it?

Yes, of course, exam boards have always made allowances for candidates suffering real distress. But to have it so formalised just seems ridiculous.

Wonder what my old colleague Caroline would have thought. When she was doing A-levels at a convent, she and her family were involved in a serious car accident. Her parents and brother were very badly injured and in hospital for months. In between all the worry and hospital visiting, no one really had time for her, so she was patched up and sent back to her convent - even though her arm was in one of those strange sticky-out slings which made writing very tricky and going through doorways almost impossible.

The nuns, however, wasted little time on sympathy. They drove her to hospital once a week to visit her family, but the rest of the time she was briskly told to offer her own suffering up to God and get on with her A-levels. Which she did.

Whether anyone wrote an extenuating note on her exam paper, I have no idea, but somehow I doubt it. She was just glad to have something to concentrate on, did well in her exams and had a robust attitude to life ever after.

A former O-level examiner in Northern Ireland wrote in The Times yesterday that he had to deal with appeals when parents had been killed by terrorists or when bombs had gone off near school.

And as we have just been celebrating VE Day, we should remember what horrors exam candidates went through then. My ex-boss went to school one day only to find it wasn't there any more - it had been blown to bits by the Germans. I don't suppose people got extra marks in their School Certificate for that.

Exams are more than just a test of facts or memory. They are also a test of an ability to cope.

Life is rarely easy or plain sailing. Things happen. Small disasters, major tragedies, inconveniences and headaches (worth, incidentally, one per cent on the sliding scale). The rampant compensation culture is already turning us into a nation of whingers, blaming everyone but ourselves, always expecting other people to make allowances instead of relying on our own extra efforts.

But part of growing up is learning how to cope. Yes it's hard. No it's not always fair. But that's how life is. So deal with it.

And get your hands from round the hamster's neck...

PLANS for a statue of Andy Capp, right, in Hartlepool, home town of his creator Reg Smythe, have been abandoned, apparently because of political correctness.

Never mind Andy. What we really need is a statue of the much more deserving character - his long-suffering wife Flo - complete with rolling pin.

Now that could concentrate a few minds...

A Which? Report has found enormous variations in house valuations by estate agents, torn between a quick sale and a bigger commission.

Doesn't surprise us.

A few years ago a friend in the village put her house up for sale. "£300 - 325,000", we thought it would get. Estate agents, meanwhile, valued it from £250,00 to £375,000 - just a bit of a wide range.

She sold it for £320,000 - which proves we had a better idea than most of the estate agents.

Which is why, when we sold our last two houses, we didn't bother with an estate agent but did it all ourselves. Pour guesswork, we reckoned, was just as good as theirs.

DRIVING round Darlington and all its roadworks and lane closures these days is a bit like navigating the third circle of hell. But without the fun.

But what's really infuriating are the people who don't think that the "Lane Closed" sign refers to them, so roar merrily on - and then have to try and push in, in front of all those people they've just blithely overtaken.

Well, not in front of me, sunshine, not in front of me...

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/news /griffiths.html