This time of year, 25 years ago I got my acceptance into University College Dublin, to do my BA. This week, Mr Bodhránbanger’s niece got her acceptance into Trinity College Dublin. Leaving aside the obvious shock that she choose Trinity over my beloved UCD, it’s been a great week. And it has brought back so many memories.
In my day one poured over the morning edition of the newspapers, searching through lists and lists of CAO numbers – issued to each Leaving Certificate candidate before their exams – to find one’s number and beside it a bald statement of college and course. My hands were shaking, I felt physically sick, until I spied my number and beside it UCD, Arts BA.
My first year in UCD was halcyon….I had a fun filled, happy, upbeat year and one that ranks as the best of my teens. At 17, I was too young to drink in the pub for the first few months of my college career and by the time summer 1987 rolled around I felt as if I had grown up in UCD. (My second and third years were devoted to angst, love affairs and general drama.) There were so many possibilities and most importantly, the prospect of having to make a decision about any of them was far, far away.
In about four weeks I will have known one of my best friends 25 years. We both entered UCD together, although it would be a year before I actually got to know him properly, beyond a hello and goodbye, or a shared tutorial. He was a constant; reliable, highly intelligent, sometimes eccentric but always 100 per cent authentic.
I have a wish for Mr Bodhránbanger’s niece. I hope on her first day she talks to someone, and makes friends with them, and 25 years later, when she hears of someone going to college themselves, sits and smiles for an afternoon thinking of them, and the friendship they have shared. In the end, long after exams have ceased to matter and when all the cool luminaries of the college social scene are forgotten, that is what makes “the game worth the candle.”
