The Never List

When I was a teenager, I walked to school every single day with the same girl. We had little in common apart from form teacher and the direction of our houses, but these two factors were enough to tie us into half a decade of tired conversations that both of us enthusiastically forgot a few seconds after they were finished.

All, that is, apart from this one:

"Are you revising for our exams, then?" I asked her, a few months before our GCSEs. She laughed.
"No way! Are you kidding? I just sit and watch telly every night."
"Really? You`re not revising at all?"
"I`m so bad, I know, but I just can`t find the energy after school."
"Me neither," I agreed, and - comforted that it wasn`t just me who was using my maths books as foot rests - went home that night and watched telly with a sense of peace I`d been missing for weeks that had been filled with my mum`s anxious nagging.

I checked in every week or so after that: was she studying yet? No, she consistantly told me. She was not studying. She never studied. And - just to be sure - I checked in with a few of my fellow schoolmates. Were they studying? No, they all told me. They never studied. Who could be bothered to study? Who had nothing better to do than study for stupid exams? And, they implied with a few raised eyebrows, my fierce questions about studying were making me look deeply eager and uncool, and so it was probably a good idea if I stopped so that I didn`t slip even further down the Geek ladder. So I relaxed, and - slightly ashamed that I`d been so worried - also refused to study. We would all fail together, I decided. It might even make me more popular, if I got the same grades as everyone else. Perhaps people would stop writing things about how Geeky I was in the school toilets.

And then came the day of our first exam, and as we walked to school - batting the same inane topics backwards and forwards - out came the revision cards. Hundreds of the buggers. Colour coded, printed, notated, filed in a little plastic box. Worn down by busy little thumbs.
"Eh?" I said, still confused. "Where did they come from?"
"Oh," she said, looking shifty. "I threw them together in about ten minutes."
I looked at the cards - a ruler had been used for all of the straight lines - and immediately suspected she was lying. And then I looked at the dates on them. Four months previous. And I knew.
"You`ve been studying, havn`t you," I said in a flat voice, panic rising up my windpipe. "You`ve been studying for ages."
"Not really," she said, without making eye contact. And then she lifted her chin and looked at me defensively, as if it was somehow my fault for believing her in the first place. "But, you know, Holly, these are our GCSEs. They`re kind of important, after all."

I`m not sure I ever got over the shock. When I said I wasn`t studying, I meant it. My not studying had been part of a greater plan to make me like everybody else. But the fatal flaw I hadn`t foreseen was: everybody else had been lying. When we got to school, everybody had revision cards. I was the only moron who had decided to tell the truth because it hadn`t occurred to me I`d get further ahead by keeping quiet. And the only thing I could do to save myself was hope and pray that I had studied hard enough for the last five years to be able to smudge through on long-term memory instead of short term (I did, but that`s not the moral of the story).

I`d been Nevered, I finally realised, and I didn`t forget it. Throughout life, it turned out, there are always people who will pretend never to do something because it makes them look better, look cooler, look less bothered, and because it fools everybody else into not doing it either and therefore gives them an edge over the competition. Because let`s make no bones about it: everything is a competition. Life and everything in it is a competition: to win, whatever the topic, even if it`s just to stay alive when everybody else is dead. It`s just a question of how seriously you take it, what you`re prepared to do to win, and exactly how you want to play it.

After my first Nevering, the list grew quickly. The Never Studyers continued all the way through Uni - sneaking in ten hours of essay writing time a night and then playing table football in public all day so nobody could ever guess - and then morphed into the Never Really Workers (the I`m on Facebook All Dayers, who absolutely were not). The Never Savers were the next big gang: the people who pretended that they didn`t have four pence to rub together and then bought houses with the 15 grand they`d accidentally saved on the quiet and looked a little bit smug when everyone asked how the hell they managed it. Then there were the Never Eat Vegetablers, who claimed to feast on kebabs and yet stuffed their faces with broccoli when nobody was looking, and the Never Do Exercisers, who pretended they could barely lift themselves off the sofas and yet ran 15k as soon as everybody looked in the opposite direction. There were the Never Drink Enough Waterers - insinuating that the only thing that ever passed their lips was beer and vodka, and secretly rehydrating - and the Oops, Never Use Contraceptioners, who were somehow never the ones who got pregnant. There were the Never Look After My Skiners - with AHAs and RetinAs and a Harry Potter cabinet full of potions and lotions to keep them looking pretty - and the Never Watch Calorieers who somehow stayed 4 stone forever, and the Never Dye My Hairers, whose locks remained gloriously and expensively highlighted.

I was sucked into all of them: partly because I`m stupid, partly because I`m incapable of detecting a lie, or a falsehood, or a smudged truth, and partly because I wanted to. I knew - deep down - that everybody I knew probably wasn`t broke, lazy, full of fried food, smoking and drinking chocolate milkshakes all day (the way they pretended they were), and surfing the internet, but I preferred thinking they might be, because I was. And it took me a very long time to realise that the only not to lose in every single way was to ignore what everyone else was saying and get on with my own plans. Like saving money. And looking after my skin. And eating vegetables. And drinking enough water. All of which I try very hard to do, incidentally, and I`ll happily admit it to anyone who asks, however uncool it makes me. Exercise is the last on the list: and that`s what I`m tackling now. And while I don`t like it much right now (it hurts), I`ve been amazed by the amount of Never Exercisers who have admitted to exercising regularly now that I say I`m trying to.

It will never end, of course: the claims will just start to shift. And they always come out in the end. The Never Wear Sunscreeners? Let`s see just how unwrinkled they are in fifteen years, when everybody who actually wore none looks like handbags. The Never Started a Private Pensioners? I wonder how many will be jetting around the mediteranean when everyone else is dividing their baked beans in half. It`ll be interesting to see just how many of the Never Do Weights group fail to ever get bingo wings, or how many of the Never Eat Non Animal Protein Equivalents have incredibly low cholesterol. As for the Never Do Exercisers: just how many will inexplicably still be able to touch their toes past the age of 50? Quite a few, I reckon.

And hopefully - with a little bit of effort now - I might be one of them.

I just won`t be pretending at any stage that I can`t.