I always thought I’d get Honours in English in the Leaving Cert in 1974 - yes, and in History and geography and Irish too!

But it was all ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity’, as Ecclesiastes wrote in his famous Book of the Bible long, long ago, and I got just a single, lonesome Honour in Irish.

Bhí mé bronach at the time, but as the English writer, Jimmy Howell, wrote around 1660, ‘no use in crying over spilt milk’.

Maybe if I had spent more time studying Wordsworth and Keats and Shakespeare back then, the results might have been better, but shur, what matter it now?

I loved plays and pantomimes and musicals as a garsún and that passion remains undimmed. Though I absolutely adore nearly every kind of dramatic event, my inability to ‘learn lines’ always mitigated against serious participation and negatively impacted any possible progress to the West End or Hollywood!

I do marvel though at that wonderful ability that so many have to take a script and memorise their part line by line, word for word. That’s only half the battle - then to go on stage and bring forth from the recesses of the brain the correct line at the correct time – what a wonderful gift and talent to possess.

Not sure what play was on our English Leaving Cert Course, might have been Julius Caeser. I had studied Latin up to the Inter Cert so ‘Et tu Brute?’ (You also, Brutus?) and ‘Veni, vedi, vici’ (I came, I saw, and I conquered) were familiar enough to me.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” and “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once” are other quotes that came to mind recently when I leafed through my old textbook from the........

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