ONCE a teacher always a teacher - you will forever think that the year begins in September. You will make resolutions and go to the dry cleaners with an arm full of stuff, you will get your hair cut and go to bed early for a couple of nights in order to take the dark circles from under the eyes.
You will get ready to hear what everyone else in the staff room did for the summer, if you like them you'll be delighted they took up golf or the Internet or unsuitable alliances. If you don't like them you can just say to yourself that this was typical of them.
But like fishermens' tales, part of the social fabric is that you listen. If you do listen to them, they have to listen to you. It's a trading situation, and as you get older you realise that the only hope of getting a hearing at all is to keep it short.
And even outside the school staff room they tell holiday stories, and with interest I heard brief tales of those who exchanged homes, who took a cottage and were rained on for 19 out of 21 days but got a lot of reading done, who went on a sort of house party to the Dordogne which they all loved and others who went on an art tour with neighbours which they all hated.
There was a man who went on a cookery course, a woman who minded awful children for a rich couple, a girl who went on a package holiday and got so drunk the night she arrived that she spent the next 13 days recovering, a couple who went to Galway and pined so much for their new baby back in Dublin that the minder brought the baby to visit them on a day excursion.
I heard of a B&B that serves a glass of sherry three times a week during Coronation Street, and all the guests bond with each other like mad and become inseparable and never want to leave the guest house for the rest of their lives.
And in my turn I told of packing the car and putting in two chairs and a little table for a picnic or a game of chess when there was a peaceful field of moo cows in the distance, or a forest or a river bank. And of the places we stayed in.
Annestown House, Annestown Co, Waterford - a gorgeous, big, rambling place not far from Tramore, with a croquet lawn and a private walk down to a quiet beach.
Stanley House, Schull, West Cork, where Nancy Brosnan's little guest house shines and glistens and the garden is so full of flowers you wonder if you in a garden centre.
The Falls Hotel, Ennistymon, Co Clare, which was where the Merriman Summer School was held this year - a grand big swooping kind of place with plenty of room for us all and terrific young people working there.
It's all so much the same as before, someone complained to me. But wasn't it great to have found out what I like in life instead of always out seeking it, I said, trying to beat hack the slightly testy note in my voice.
TWO boys in lovely clean shirts that had not yet known ink, mud or tomato ketchup were starting big school and eyeing each other speculatively. They might be friends for life, they might be enemies, they might be indifferent. It would all depend on what they managed to draw out of each other that morning on the DART.
"What did you hate most in the summer?" asked the one with the red hair.
The other was interested in the question.
"We had to get our dog put to sleep," he said eventually.
That wasn't bad, as an answer, so the red haired boy nodded.
"Did you stay while it was being dope?" he asked. Another match point. A lot depended on this.
"I wanted to," said the boy who had lost his dog, "but the vet said no, that he'd do it quicker and easier on his own. But I did bury him. I did all the digging."
"Yeah, sure." The redheaded boy was going to like him.
"What did you hate most?" the triumphant boy asked.
"The kissing. It went on all summer.
"Did it? Like with babes and things?"
"No, with aunts and grandmothers and everything, they'd lunge at you."
"Yuck," said the new friend.
"Yuck," said the red haired boy, frowning and rubbing his face at the memory.
SO what did I hate most in the summer, I wondered, when they had got up and walked off companionably to their new life.
I hate AA Road Watch with a passion. I hate it more than I hate Met Eireann. We know that it will be sunny with showers. If we don't know that we shouldn't be out there attempting to lead useful lives. I would as soon look in the entrails of a dead sheep to know about the weather as listen to the weather forecast.
But AA Road Watch! This reveals something deeply bad in our psyche that we give air time to people who will say that Merrion Road is crowded and Pearse Street is at a standstill.
I rang the Automobile Association just to get the correct spelling of Karen Chew's name, I guessed that Lorraine Keane and Conor Faughnan were as they sounded. The woman who answered the phone was helpful.
"You like AA Road Watch?" she asked.
"I hate it," I said.
"Would you like to speak to one of them?" she suggested. It would have been churlish not to. So I spoke to Conor Faughnan and he put the case for the defence. According to market research, he said, people like news first, then music, then traffic. It was third from the top of the list of people's priorities. They get comfort from hearing that other places are crowded too. They like to hear about their particular bad spot and are disappointed if it is overlooked.
He said they sit in a tiny studio in Suffolk Street, the size of a phone box and lined with egg boxes, and they get information from the Gardai, the Corporation, their own AA vans and the helicopter. They can tell you some things that you mightn't know about beyond Pearse Street and Merrion Road, he said - for example, where a traffic light was broken, or an accident. He was courteous, helpful, delighted with his role, convinced that most people loved Roadwatch in its seven years of existence, and was sorry that I didn't like it, but of course everyone had to have their view.
I wish I had never talked to him. Now I can't leap across and turn him off the moment he comes on, nor Karen nor Lorraine. They're good people doing their job. I was so secure in this prejudice and now I will have to find someone new to hate.