Personal Columns – Page 5 – For the fainthearted . . .

Stupidity

‘There is a severe infection in your right ear.’

‘Yes. It perforated last Tuesday.’

‘So you thought it reasonable to leave it a week before you saw a doctor?’

(I refrained from adding that it had been painful for some days before, but that I had tickets for rugby matches in Limerick, Dublin and Belfast and I was determined to attend, and that the perforation had at least reduced the pain that was being endured with packets of Panadol Extra).

‘Now, let us listen to your lungs.’

I took off …

Feeling old

‘You don’t look sixty-two, sir,’ said a sixth year student.

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘you are very kind to say so.’

There was a temptation to ask what he thought a sixty-two year old might look like.

Being older than the parents of most of the staff and being the age of the grandparents of many of the students, I am aware that I am in a land unimaginable to the teenagers I try to teach.

Last year was much easier. Last year, I could walk to school, and if …

Irreconcilable

Charles Dickens has become a daily companion. There are free unabridged readings of his works on YouTube. A voluntary group called Librivox have uploaded a selection of work which now fills my many hours of journeying. The voice of reader Mil Nicholson endows with life the characters drawn by Dickens. The forty mile journey from Athboy back to Dublin at the end of each school day has become a time passed in a profitable way.

There is not a single Dickens character whose vocabulary I do not envy, even the …

A winter’s journey

It is forty-one years today since he died – a Sunday in December 1981.

The telephone rang in Somerset. ‘Ian, my Dad died last night’.

‘Would you like me to come over?’

It was too late in the day to begin to travel to Scotland for a ferry to Larne. The alternative was an overnight journey, via Dublin.

The man in the ticket office looked at me with suspicion. A ticket to Ireland from Taunton had to be hand written. He took out the fares book to find the fare …

Being an artefact

The history textbook is called Artefact, it is an attractive and imaginative presentation of history.

I once once called an ‘artefact.’ It was the humanities teachers’ Christmas dinner and the conversation had turned to television. ‘I remember Channel 5 starting,’ said one of the younger members of the department.

‘I remember Channel 4 starting,’ commented a teacher who was a smidgen older than the first.

I lent back in my chair and admitted that I remembered BBC 2 going on air.

‘You are an historical artefact, sir,’ said one of …

Not game

Until I saw today’s Google Doodle, marking the 82nd anniversary of Jerry Lawson, the electronic games pioneer, I had always been convinced that I had been born far too early to ever be adept at electronic games. Now, I realize that it is not a question of age but ineptness.

My first encounter with such games was the game where you played table tennis with two controllers connected to your television, which you could obtain cheap with vouchers from Corn Flakes boxes it came out when I was at school. …