Taking a degree of pride in academic achievement and what’s another year?
‘ That’s the full series now.’ Medders stood back and admired the set of four photos displayed on the mantlepiece above the great fireplace at The Manor.
He had been rooting in the attic, looking for some ancient sports programmes he felt certain must be up there somewhere. However, the football memorabilia never surfaced during his trawl among the packing cases and the cobwebs. Instead he found a framed photograph of himself, harking back to the seventies. The picture with the imitation teak frame was in colour, just about. The photographer had clearly positioned the camera low so that Medders loomed very tall, very impressive and, as he gazed confidently into the distance rather than into the lens, very wise. Small wonder that the now elderly subject scarcely recognised his own youthful likeness, captured more than four decades ago on the occasion of his graduation from college. His initial reaction on holding it up was to wonder out loud: ‘Heh, who’s the gobdaw with the hair?’
Only after wiping the dust from the glass and examining it more closely in full daylight away from the gloom of the attic was he convinced that the gobdaw with the luxurious brown thatch really was himself. The graduation ceremony, he recalled, was staged a few months before he decided to have his locks chopped off in order to achieve a ragged resemblance to Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. Previously he had favoured a to-the-shoulder style, vaguely modelled on the lead singer in The Sweet, a look which required a great deal of brushing in order to persuade the hair to curl inwards rather than flounce outwards.
Once trimmed, Medders never again allowed his coif to run to Sweet length. The short-cut approach which began as a matter of fashion became baked in once the cover thinned and any attempt to grow long would merely court ridicule. These days he took inspiration not so much from rock stars and more from Pep Guardiola, the balding football manager…
‘Wow! That must be you,’ exclaimed Hermione as she joined her husband in front of the fireplace. ‘You look like a visionary. And I love the perm.’
‘It was not a perm. That was the result of hard work with a hairbrush.’
‘I am glad you have unearthed it. Now we are all present and correct. All four of us.’
True. The portrait of Medders had joined those of Eldrick, Persephone and his beloved above the hearth, each member of the quartet be-gowned in academic splendour. He made the grade in the seventies while the other three all took their parchments in the new millennium.
‘No one made any great fuss about it at the time but I was the first member of our family to go to university,’ he mused. ‘Father had a good job and saw education as important so he was happy to pay the fees. He did well himself to make it to sixth year in school back in the forties.’
‘ The country has come a long way,’ remarked Persephone whose degree was achieved in large part through distance learning rather than sitting through innumerable lectures in person.
‘ The number of students in the college I attended has quadrupled since I was a freshman half a century ago. UCD, Maynooth, UCC and the rest of them have all mushroomed and there is a multitude of institutions unheard of back then.’
Ireland – a nation once more of scholars, if not saints. + Here’s another contender for the worst -joke-ever-told title.,,Picture the scene. A swamp. And through the swamp comes a figure, a man whose progress is achingly slow as the water is up to his thighs. As he approaches, we see that he is sweating and weary, his brow muddied where he has wiped at the perspiration. Now that he is close, we think that maybe we recognise him, though we are not quite sure. Is it the Eurovision man? Could it really be Johnny Logan? Then he halts and all doubt is dispelled as he begins to sing:
‘I’ve been wading, such a long time…