Let's call him Bob R, just in case he is now a reasonably normal, moderately useful, member of society with a family, a job and a boss who doesn't lie awake at night worrying about what havoc Bob R might be planning to wreak in the morning.
Frankly, I reckon the odds of Bob R being a well-adjusted adult at about 75 to 1, maybe 80 to 1. As a schoolboy, Bob R was nuttier than a bag of squirrels and, short of plugging him into the national grid for extended periods, that situation was unlikely to change.
At lunchtimes, Bob R used to climb out of our third-floor classroom window and walk along the metal windowsill, clinging to the frame with his fingertips. In the science lab, Bob R would discreetly link all the capacitors together and watch as the smoke began to curl from the coils.
He would wait until he was the last pupil in a classroom, some unfortunate business teacher the sole remaining adult presence, and then leave the room, closing the door gently behind him and taking the door handles with him.
Recognising that the French teacher's Renault had a faulty handbrake, he would give it a discreet push and send it gliding soundlessly towards the nearest wall. Bob R was a one-man wave of adolescent anarchy.
There were days when only the promise of mayhem, whether caused by Bob R or one of his soul-mates, made me stay in school, because I hated being there. I spent the early years of secondary school pretending to be sick in the hope of being sent home. Occasionally, I was released. Mostly, I was forced to stay.
By the later years, my attitude had changed to that of a soldier in a long, drawn-out campaign: if I kept my head down and stayed out of trouble, I'd get through it eventually.
To be honest, I was kind of an unhappy child, so the blame for my lack of enthusiasm can't be laid entirely at the doors of the school or its teachers. Like every school, and every profession, Synge Street had its share of time-servers, dopes and no-hopers, the kind of people who couldn't teach a chimp to peel a banana. (In any other walk of life, such people are usually shunted away to one side where the amount of harm they can do is limited. n teaching, unfortunately, they remain repeat offenders until retirement, becoming little blights on the lives they touch.)
But Synge Street was, and probably still is, also gifted with teachers who genuinely cared for the welfare of their pupils and wanted to see them do well in life. And while career and subject guidance was perfunctory at best (for example, nobody took me discreetly to one side and opined that since I had trouble counting my spare change and had next to no interest in the worlds of science and finance, then honours maths, honours physics and honours economics were subjects to which I might be intellectually and temperamentally ill-suited), a succession of teachers noted that I could string a couple of sentences together and that words might prove to be my salvation when NASA and the World Bank eventually rejected my applications for work (D in physics, C in economics, virtually no understanding of either). To them, I remain grateful.
I left Synge Street in 1985, and have never returned. I didn't stay in touch with my fellow pupils, some of whom I'd known for 10 years. I turned my back on all of it without looking over my shoulder once. I don't miss school, and can only guess that those who regard their schooldays as the best days of their lives are not leading the happiest of adult existences.
But I still smile at the memory of Bob L on the windowsill; of the girl at the Olympic Ballroom who gave me my first kiss ("Don't you even want to know my name?"); of the casual torments visited on those figures of authority whom we regarded as beneath respect.
And of a small band of young men, their black blazers rumpled and torn, briefly united before the winds scattered them like dark seeds upon the earth.
