Colm O'Regan: Back-to-school is always mixed feelings, but you can't beat the newness of it
Colm O'Regan: "The pristine books, reading ahead to things that seemed impossible to learn in September but that you’d be handy enough with by May. You looked with awe at things you didn’t know you didn’t know."
Sometimes the summer never starts. Sometimes the summer starts late. Sometimes you get the autumn feeling even before the Rose of Tralee starts.
But this year, the summer ended in the most obvious way possible. It just lashed rain at the end of it, and the leaves are falling early. After a summer of drought, the trees are thinking “feck it, we’ll leave it”. All in all, it has made the transition almost filmic or Ladybird Book-ic.
There’s a Big day next week. Judging by the number of decisions, work, promises, self-improvement and general Ah That Can Waits, I’m calling it the early Autumn New Years. The first of September. The cheques written all the way through the summer will be cashed. Luckily it’s on Tuesday so Monday (September’s Eve) is going to be ‘lit’.
was a bestseller at this time of the year for decades. I remember as a child being fascinated with how so many people felt the need to start something in September by choice. Now I get it. During the summer you have some chance to have A Good Hard Look At Yourself and decide you need improvement.
There is indulgence but not as much as Christmas. The book seems to have stopped being a book-book around the mid-twenty-teens. Wolfhound Press had been bought in 2001. The company was dissolved without fanfare on January 12 of this year. But I wonder how many thousands of people dreamt big in late August about the course that would finally unlock their potential. Nightcourses.com seems to be the replacement. And I am THIS close to signing up for either Latin or Eyebrow Threading. Each one could unlock something in me.
Maybe it’s a craving for newness. Going back to school was always mixed feelings, but you couldn’t bate the newness of it. One school tie to do you for your career. A new school jumper about once every Olympic cycle, a new pair of slacks slightly more often. For a glorious month it had an actual crease in it. And in one of the years the slacks that fitted you. The first year too big, the last year too small, the middle year was Goldilocks time. The pristine books, reading ahead to things that seemed impossible to learn in September but that you’d be handy enough with by May. You looked with awe at things you didn’t know you didn’t know.
When the history books branched out from Ireland and chronicled the Bad Things Other Europeans Did. The infamous pike up the hole picture from the Spanish conquistadors. And the copybooks. 10 Aisling copy books prescribed by the booklist. Getting thicker and more narrow-lined by the year. How grown up you felt when you no longer needed the high pink for the bs, h-es, ks, ls and the lower pinks for gs, js, ps, qs. (you don’t go all the way up with the fs and ts, that’s a schoolboy error).
The joy of getting them second hand in the Book Mart or the Shelf. The precious money you got from selling a book in the Shelf. (The man there would take the book, look at it with a practiced eye, spend a long time tapping out what looked like Fermat’s last theorem on a calculator before announcing “A Pound” as you handed over your old Busy At Maths. All he was missing was the jeweller's loupe.
There might be a few books bought after the start of school. They were like players bought just before the Transfer Window closed.
So much newness. So much possibility. I am surely setting myself up for disappointment. There’s always October, I suppose.
