HEART BEAT:In the past we had to do the Leaving and Junior Certs on our own without the help of TV pundits, writes MAURICE NELIGAN
I AM waiting for full tide and watching the water creeping over the sand, making patterns of peninsulas and islands and then submerging them with its inexorable advance. I wondered idly if they had no Green Party in Atlantis, or maybe like now they were simply ignored.
Below the house there is a big seaweed-covered rock on the beach. This is covered by all but the lowest tide. Its disappearance means that the water depth is suitable for swimming. It is another glorious day and I am going to swim.
I have been a swimmer as long as I can recall and water pollution was not a fact of life that we had to live with in those far-off days. I learned to swim in Blackrock Baths and always have preferred swimming in salt water.
In long summer holidays me and my friends swam in Williamstown, Seapoint, the White Rock at Killiney and many other places. I was not just a fair-weather swimmer, but definitely a seasonal one; the season being delineated by holidays, school, university and the more restricted free time of a working life.
Retirement from active practice has extended my season from Easter time to possibly late October. At least so I delude myself.
The definition of fair weather has tightened a bit also; snowstorms and gales being excluded and common sense deciding my approach to the water. I tell myself that it is good for me and worse still, in Ancient Mariner-like fashion; I unhesitatingly tell others that it is good for them also.
As their eyes glaze over and they desperately seek escape, I am quite conscious that I am being a righteous prat. If asked for the scientific evidence to support my contention that swimming confers health benefits, I would be unable to comply and would be reduced to that refuge of charlatans, “sure everybody knows that”.
I still remember many of the principles taught to me as I learned to swim. Always swim within your limits, try to know the place where you swim, better not swim on an ebb tide, avoid shelving beaches and so on.
Never drink and swim; it all seems so obvious, yet people continue to ignore basic precepts and lose their lives in consequence. Thank God we’ve no man-eating sharks off our beaches yet, ours are the land-based variety who would make the Great Whites look like pinkeens.
John Masefield wrote, “I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide, is a wild call and a clear call, and will not be denied.”
There you are now; the tide’s in and I am going for my swim.
I am back from the water, feeling invigorated and refreshed. Have you ever noticed that if you ask somebody what was the water like, the invariable response, even if delivered from a blue body through chattering teeth is, “it was lovely”. Nobody ever says, “it was bloody freezing” and its corollary, “I’m a lunatic”. It was lovely today.
Nobody could be unaware that the State exams Leaving and Junior Certs or whatever they’re called, have started.
I am no stranger to exams and their problems and suffered on the treadmill with everybody else. In my time that was my concern and, apart from family and friends, nobody else cared very much.
There were no career guidance teachers, no educational psychologists, no education correspondents for the major newspapers and the world still managed to revolve.
Our teachers told us basic things about rationing our time and reading the instructions on the paper and then reading the questions carefully.
Such advice was not broadcast hourly on radio and television with every sort of guru from the Minister down proffering a mixture of advice and well wishes. Nobody appeared to give much of a damn whether our hands dropped off from writing and whether two long papers in a day would be too much for our fragile brains.
Now we have spawned an industry of sages empowered to tell our students what to do.
Furthermore, we have students reporting breathlessly as it were from the battlefield; “They exploded two mines today in home economics and sank half the girls without trace” or “a bomb exploded in chemistry today and blew the lads to kingdom come”.
Essentially that’s their problem. It was mine once and then I moved on with the rest of my life. These students will also. The rest of the nation had better things to do than to be dragged through the exam halls with you. Sure it’s a tough time but as immortalised in West Side Story, “Jeez Mac I’ve got troubles of my own.”
Bearing in mind that the dark ages to which I harken back had just about legitimised the use of the ball point pen to write answers and that, furthermore, those sitting the Leaving Certificate had a further complete exam immediately following, ie the matriculation exams of various universities.
This was supposed to function as a belt and braces arrangement for those who might be wobbly in one or other exam. It seemed at the time for those involved that you would remain writing forever while the summer outside, and indeed the world, passed you by.
That being said in my usual contradictory fashion; I will give you some advice myself. Ignore the barrage of banal rubbish being foisted on you from every direction. Grit your collective teeth and get on with it. The world will wait for you.
Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon