ABSTRACT
These past two weeks, whenever the sun shone and the air was hot and drowsy and I caught on the air the smell of warm grass, I was transported back to a piece of school: to the brief Elysian eternity that lay between A levels and the end of it all. The memory was intensified, I suppose, because my own children are getting to that stage. One: has left, the other will a year hence. But whatever is causing it, it is powerful: long days, long grass, relief at the lifting of long years of pressure to revise and remember. I can feel again now the high spirits, the extravagant hopes for the new life and the occasional sickening plunge of self-doubt: hell, this is it, this is real, I’m not a schoolkid any more . . .
