Country Living with Francis Farragher

IT’S a week when many teenagers – and a few more mature students too – will begin to breathe a sigh of relief as the Leaving Cert and Junior Cert exams draw to a close. It’s a time of family tension too as parents and siblings of those sitting the exams find themselves walking on eggshells in order not to upset those facing into their first major academic examinations in life.

Like the vast majority of the population, once I bade farewell to exams at Tuam CBS and UCG, I never had any hankering to repeat that process, although I do admire people I know who later in life embrace academia with an enthusiasm and bravado that’s quite refreshing.

Those who return to education at a later stage of life do so with a purpose in mind and in UCG at hit-and-miss attendance at lectures, we’d always the few mature students in the hall – up at the front; diligently taking notes; and maybe having a word or two afterwards with the lecturer.

Even from the primary schooldays of the 1960s, there always seemed to be a fear element with education but as bad and all as school was, an effort at ‘mitching’ for a day went disastrously wrong.

Along with a friend of mine who was a little more experienced in the art of mitching we took shelter in an under-road tunnel about a mile before our scheduled school destination, only for an unmerciful deluge to descend upon us.

Around 10am, my friend decided to go home on the basis that he was feeling sick while I traipsed into school a good hour late with a readymade excuse of having to help my father clear out the cattle who had broken into the meadow field.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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