For the past couple of weeks, most of the people I know have been going to Scotland, England and (gasp) Wales for university. I’ve watched it happen to all the people in the years above me in school, but I honestly never thought that the day would come when it would actually be… us.
It has been said that you’ll never see most of the people that you meet in school again. While that may not be as true now – what with Facebook, Bebo, IM, etc – I know that there’s some people I won’t miss, and a whole lot of people I will. Looking back on even just the past couple of years, if I’d known how everything had turned out in the end I probably would have been a bit different, but so would everyone else I suppose. It’s interesting – the teenage years are essentially over. It didn’t really hit me until the other day when I thought about being much older, and looking back on my life… and I realised that the teenage years, the school years, were a chapter already written, and no amount of trying would be able to change what had already happened. When you talk to your children about “that time long ago when I was at school…” you’ll be talking about something which, as of this moment,you’ve already done. And while I’m glad that some of it is over (5th year GCSEs spring to mind) I’m remembering a specific line of the poem Mrs Torrens treasured so much:
“Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”
Strange how in hindsight, foresight would have been useful, isn’t it?
- David
