Frank McNally’s Big Regret? I was about 25 before I gave up on the dream

After leaving school at 17, I embarked on a primary degree course at the famous University of Life. The classes were mostly based in civil service offices in Dublin, and nearby pubs and cafes. But there were also modules on the building sites of London and in the Australian outback, as well as a short but educational interlude in Japan.

The course took more than a decade and there were no exams at the end. But I must have passed because, at age 29, I was allowed onto an actual Master’s course in a real university. And they gave the MA 12 months later.

Still, I’m always a little haunted by the thought of what I missed in not going to proper college after school. In my early years in Dublin, I used to wander through the front square of Trinity, day and night, romanticising the education I might have had there, not least at the hands of the fiercely liberated women rumoured to populate the campus. I was about 25 before I gave up on the dream.

Apart from anything else, a few years in university would have eased the transition from freedom to work. When you grow up on a farm, it’s a terrible shock to spend your 18th summer in an overheated office. I knew something of what Patrick Kavanagh felt when, tripping along the ledges of Grafton Street, he wrote ruefully about the “Queen of Hearts still baking tarts and I not making hay”.

Such was my aversion to the 9-to-5 regime, I used up most of my annual leave from the office job in half days: mornings usually, so that I could sit in cafés reading. Many’s the hour I spent happily surrounded by tarts (the ones Kavanagh referred to) in Bewleys, while devouring Russian novels that I hoped would transform me into an intellectual.

A favourite was Maxim Gorky's My Universities, which was about his frustrated attempts to get an education. We had that much in common, at least, even if he was living in 1880s Russia, and leading a life of genuine hardship compared with mine. His "universities" included a bakery where he worked 14-hour days, and various night-time meetings with revolutionaries, religious fanatics, and other eccentrics.

Despairing of life once, he tried to shoot himself in the heart, and missed. But he graduated eventually when, in his mid-20s, he came to the attentions of an editor who invited him to write up his many adventures. On that basis, he got a job in a newspaper.

My life was uneventful compared with his. And maybe, looking back, I needed those 10 years of what seemed like wasted time. Even so, I still think I could have done things better, or at least earlier, via the conventional route.

By the time Dublin City University let me onto their MA in Journalism, as the token mature student among 24 actual graduates, I had been freelancing for several years, and making something like a living. There wasn’t that much left to learn. But the course did land me a placement in a newspaper, and then a job. So maybe things worked out for the best, for both Gorky and me. Like Robert Frost and his two paths, we’ll never know what we missed.