TheLastStraw: 'So, you're saying us kids would believe any old rubbish," we said to him, at which point, weary from it all, he must have considered packing in teaching. All he was doing was trying to explain what Patrick Kavanagh might have meant by the line "through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder", but being the age we were we took offence at what we perceived to be an insinuation that young people were gullible eejits who'd swallow a brick.
He tried again, insisting that, no, that's not what he meant at all. He told us the theme of the poem, Advent, was "the loss of innocence", that a "growth in awareness results in the loss of the youth's belief in the goodness, beauty and mystery of life. The damage is done by indiscriminate experience to one's perceptive processes, the palling of the imagination and the desensitising of the emotions, resulting in a state of psychological or spiritual exhaustion".
"Exactly - you think we're thick."
On reflection it was probably at times like this that he rued the decision of the school to ban gobstoppers. They were dangerous, they decided, a child could choke on them. "Mmm," he probably said to himself that day.
In fairness to him he tried again and got quite excited when a hand was raised at the back of the class by a youngster willing to offer him some assistance. "Is it like this, Sir - when Pam found Bobby Ewing alive and well in the shower, even though he died the year before, grown-ups said 'that's stupid', but kids said 'jeez, Bobby's back'? 'Cos they'd believe it 'cos it's on the telly?" At which point he let us out early. We cheered, but asked if we could do Emily Dickinson tomorrow instead, because "we love all that death stuff, Sir". He said yes, put his head in his hands and told us that he felt a funeral in his brain. So Digger told him he'd get him some aspirin.
It was the recent council junk collection that, in a roundabout sort of way, helped offer an explanation for "through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder" that, if it had been provided by Sir, would have clarified the business for the whole class. Even for Digger.
More precisely, it was all down to some of the items that the County Council might have had to collect from the front gate if nostalgia hadn't intervened and put them back in their box. Records, to be precise. All of them found buried under 6ft of dust, singles that hadn't been played in more than 20 years. All of them placed in the "might throw it out but not sure yet" bundle, alongside the "will definitely throw it out" collection, which initially only contained a Fuzzy Felt farmyard, before it got switched to the "cripes, you couldn't throw that out" heap.
Twenty, maybe 30 years on, and the chink had grown so wide, the damage done by experience to one's perceptive processes so grave, that upon analysing the lyrics of some of these records the wonder was lost. An example: the Bay City Rollers and the aching realisation that their lyrics probably weren't, as you had then aggressively argued, as profound as, say, Bob Dylan's. Your argument was, on reflection, influenced more by passion than logic, especially when Les McKeown unbuttoned his little tartan jacket, prompting your tonsils to be launched across the room, hitting the far wall just as your scream reached its peak.
But really, a growth in awareness resulting in the loss of one's belief in the goodness, beauty and mystery of life could only leave you admitting that "bye bye baby, baby goodbye (bye baby, baby bye bye), bye bye baby, baby goodbye (bye baby, baby bye bye)" was not, as you had then insisted, as deep nor its message as weighty as that contained in, say, Maggie's Farm.
As for Jimmy Osmond. When Jimmy sang "I'll be your long-haired lover from Liverpool and I'll do anything you say", the crashing sound you heard echo around the universe was that of little girls fainting. But the widening chink now leads us to somewhat sceptically note: Jimmy was actually a short-haired nine-year-old from Salt Lake City.
Yes, Jimmy's fans, on the whole, liked older men, so nine fit the bill, but on reflection, what nine-year-old do you know will do anything at all that you ask of him? None. And how could Jimmy run away with us when every port would be on the look-out for a nine-year-old boy and five-year-old girl travelling alone, with nothing in their suitcases apart from a Fuzzy Felt farmyard and a supply of gobstoppers? "And that's really what Advent is all about - you desperately want to be innocent enough to still believe in Jimmy, to believe that he is a long-haired lover from Liverpool and would do anything you say, but you now concede you were a desperate eejit for ever believing him in the first place."
Frank McNally is on leave