Old school habits...

It was a strange kind of a feeling when I found myself heading off this week to my daughters’ secondary school for an information night about Transition Year.

My eldest girl is due to sit her junior certificate in the summer and so, it seems, we have to look at all the options ahead of her afterwards. I don't recall my parents having to do stuff like this - and on a Champions League night too!

That said, it seems like yesterday when my eldest actually started school and now she’s getting ready to sit her first state exams at the same secondary school I went to what seems like a lifetime ago.

Going back to these open night thingys always seems to bring back all sorts of strange recollections for me of school.

Until my girls started there, I hadn’t really all that much contact with the school that I attended since, well, since I left really.

But funnily enough there’s always that one piece of contact that does stand out.

That came about a few years ago as a result of a phone call from one of the teachers I actually liked at the place.

Still, it was the kind of call that sales people normally make. 

You know the kind that catches you out in the morning when you’re still running around trying to get the kids to school and you’ll say anything just to get off the phone.

It was only afterwards I realised that I’d just agreed to write a piece for the school for some publication or other about the long running association my family had with it over the years.

Now this might sound silly, but I especially realised I wasn’t exactly all that fussed about such a task – because my former English teacher was still there.

I mean the bad spelling I could put down to typos due to my one-fingered typing skills, but what about the grammar? 

I was picturing the red pen-marks before I’d even laid a finger on the keyboard.

Anyway my family had a long association with the school mostly due to the fact that there were so many us. We were kind of like hives. First just one appeared but after that came another and then another.

There was no getting rid of us you just had to let us run our course, which, as it happened, turned out to be a marathon.

Member after member of my family passed through the school followed quickly then by members of the next generation.

Year after year we trudged the couple of hundred yards from the house to the school that loomed over the top of our estate like a giant people magnet.

Most of time, even though we were literally five hundred yards away, we somehow always managed to get through the gates about two minutes after the first bell.

The principal at the time - who often stood there waiting for stragglers - maintained the closer we were to heaven, the further away we were from God.

In fact he didn’t just maintain it – he said it over and over again, like a broken record.

Even though I always kind of knew what he meant, I always wondered why he kept saying it?

I mean we were students, this was school - surely the word hell should have been in that sentence somewhere!

Back to the open night though and it was interesting to see how much has changed now and how these school courses were being sold to students and of course their parents.

It all sounded so great that I had to check a couple of times in case I’d gone to the wrong place.

But then I realised I was definitely in the right place, after all I had managed to arrive in two minutes late...