Do you feel like you are living in that WH Auden poem where the narrator is pleading that the clocks be stopped, the phone cut off, the piano silenced and the dog hushed?
If you do, then you must have a Leaving Cert student in your house.
Someone opened a bag of crisps in our kitchen the other night and it was deemed to be too loud for our Leaving Cert student. He was upstairs at the time.
The Leaving Cert does strange things to a household, and we should know all about it by now because it’s our third spin on this particular rodeo. We didn’t even get a saddle on the horse the first time around, as Covid-19 intervened and the exams were cancelled.
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The next child who sat the exams was so relaxed that he went to Paris for a weekend in the middle of the Leaving Cert. He did all his study at the kitchen counter while raising his head like a meerkat every five minutes to seek a distraction.
“I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” he says, as he overhears his brother trying to memorise Géibheann aloud.
If this short but perfectly formed poem doesn’t appear on the Irish paper next Tuesday, it will be truly uafásach for gach duine.
Every day is a school day for this family nowadays, thanks to his habit of sticking Post-it notes everywhere to help him remember things.
As I reach for the milk in the fridge, a yellow Post-it exclaims “Frailty, thy name is woman.” Being insulted by Hamlet before you’ve even had your coffee is a bit troubling, but we’ll soldier on.
Over at the bread bin, the five reasons for unfair dismissal are listed, while the cereal press tells us that 58,000 US soldiers died in the Vietnam war.
He now knows more about the ecofeminist theories of Vandana Shiva than his parents, which, to be fair, isn’t a high bar to vault over.
The other morning he came down the stairs and dramatically declared: “I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral in my Victorian nightgown.”
“You wha’?” said his sister as she raised a spoon of porridge to her mouth and rolled her eyes.
It was a line from a Sylvia Plath poem, and if this poet doesn’t come up on Thursday, our student will be as melancholic as the woman who was having an existential crisis in her Mirror poem.
But he would also be very happy to see Seamus Heaney’s name, so if the Derry man appears on the paper, he will rest his squat pen between his finger and thumb and dig away happily with it.
Whatever about my son, I feel like I am well prepared for these exams. The house has been stocked with enough purple Snack bars to see us through a series of apocalypses.
It was no hardship to rewatch the French series Call My Agent with him in the run-up to the oral exam, to help him perfect his Parisian accent and Gallic shrug. However, the house rebelled when he tried to get us to use the Netflix language option to watch The Office in French. Michael Scott – the incompetent boss – seemed far more intelligent when he was speaking French and that did not seem right at all.
As Leaving Cert students go, he is fairly relaxed about the whole thing, apart from occasional moments of overwhelming dread when he alternates between wishing it was all over to longing for another few weeks to prepare.
However, he has been afflicted by a strange medical condition that deserves further study. For the past few months, he has been suffering from a strange paralysis which finds him unable to move a cup from the counter to the dishwasher.
“I’m doing the Leaving Cert,” he cries when I ask if he’ll set the table.
Could he take out the bins, I wonder.
“I’m doing the Leaving Cert,” he cries again.
When I asked him to pass the salt the other day, he started to protest that he was doing the Leaving Cert before he thought better of it.
Strangely, the inability to do any gentle lifting in the kitchen does not seem to affect him when he bolts out the door for GAA training, or raises his phone to scroll through Snapchat.
It’s fair to say that we are all looking forward to June 25th when he flings his bag in the corner for the last time, and we no longer need to look at trigonometry proofs while brushing our teeth.
And I live in fervent hope that he will recover his ability to make his bed and sweep the floor. As that wise man Seamus Heaney once said, even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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