I'm thinking of going back to school next September, in more senses than one. Why? Well, I find myself on the annual treadmill of launching forth with yet another class, another run at a reading scheme that I almost know off by heart and more, many, many more multiplication tables.

I can hear myself saying things like "tall letters tall, small letters small" and "there are only two answers to `an raibh, or ni raibh' with increasing regularity and it strikes terror in my heart. I know I'm hearing what I've always believed to be the death-knell for someone of my profession: I'm becoming a cliche. But, while the same heart may not be in it for me any more, the reality is that my mortgage is, and the buck, as they say, always stops there.

What my husband calls "conversion" is the only hope, even if it conjures up images of diesel engines. So motivation (or is it desperation?) makes a part-time master's through my local Education Centre appear to be a perfect opportunity for self-fulfilment and career advancement? I try to generate images of positive rolemodels for late starters like myself, but somehow Grandma Moses grates just a little on my vanities.

So, with a certain amount of excitement and equal measures of trepidation - and panic - I decided to launch forth with some sort of after life, after teaching, after children and after hours in the sense that this foray into education will take place after I've fed, watered, counselled, threatened, bribed and spent at least a couple of hours cleaning up after or around my offspring.

My other half is goodwill personified. Adjectives, like competent, strong, intelligent and capable are being thrown around with abandon. Of course he'll be supportive, encouraging and most of all flexible, he promises as he reaches hopefully for his golf clubs. Enjoy it while you can, mate. You left out one adjective "determined"!

Of course, if I'm to be completely honest, I don't really know why I'm doing all this.

Sometimes I have this kind of Shirley Valentine vision without the happy ending where I'm carried off by the boys in white coats as I try to iron, correct copies and write a dissertation all at the one time, while my offspring are simultaneously taken into care.

"I'm too old," I wail to hubby at times like this, " I'll fail abysmally and end up right back where I started." "Look on it as, at worst, a round trip where at least you got to see a bit of the world on your way home, and, at best, the mystery tour of a lifetime," is his advice. Sometimes, just sometimes, I remember why I married him.