1989
sammywol gave me this year to write about for a "Where was I?" year.

I've tried to keep this entry short but found it impossible. There were just too many new things happening that year, as for the first time since the age of four I was liberated - albeit only temporarily - from the educational system.

The first half of the year was taken up with my last six months of secondary school, and the final school exams that you take in Ireland, the Leaving Cert. At that point I was going to a fairly relaxed mixed comprehensive school in south Dublin.

I cycled to school every day through the suburbs, going along the edge of the Stillorgan Shopping Centre and then across the dual carriageway and down the hill into Blackrock. In school, which was a nondescript 70s-era square building, I hung out at the edge of a pleasant group of girls who spent their lunch break sitting on a low stone wall just outside the school building and joking with passersby.

By that point I'd become quite resigned to the monotony of school. I even found myself enjoying the PE classes. The teacher was informative and treated us like adults, which seemed bizarre. However, I hated having to get up early in the morning. Another difficulty was that a boy in my year who I had a big crush on left abruptly in the springtime in order to do his Leaving Cert elsewhere.

I eventually ambled through the exams, in a rudderless kind of way, and did more-or-less OK - about a grade below my Inter Cert results in most subjects (during the Inter Cert I'd been at a school with rather higher academic standards). I certainly wasn't motivated to push myself to do well in the exams of my own accord, apart from music, which I loved.

On the last day of school we all dressed up in 70s clothes and played rounders with the teachers. I remember one of my classmates looking at the clothes I was wearing, which included a Chinese dressing-gown of my mother's, and saying "oh gross!" appreciatively. Nevertheless, when a group of classmates had a party in a garden near the school that afternoon, I was too shy to go - I just scuttled by on my way home. Someone even spotted me through the hedge and invited me in, and I mumbled something along the lines of "have to dash - see you!". I haven't seen her since.

Around that time, wwhyte and I went to one of the protests about Tiananmen Square at the Chinese Embassy in Ballsbridge, a silent one where everyone set on the ground and held white paper flowers. It was my first protest. I'm not sure that it had much effect, but the flowers were pretty.

I knew I'd got a place at Trinity College in Dublin studying music and philosophy, but I'd decided to follow nhw's example and take a year off between school and college. Back then this was more unusual than it is now. The only problem with this plan was that there was a huge chasm between what my parents thought I should do and what I thought I should do.

In June I'd gone to Cambridge with my parents and a German friend to attend nhw's graduation. After that, I ended up going to France and Germany for a couple of weeks, courtesy of my parents, and then heading back to Cambridge. nhw had been kind enough to fix up a place for me to stay there over the summer with some friends of his, and I was going to try and find a job. It so happened that wwhyte was in Cambridge that summer as well so I had a lot of moral support.

I loved staying at the friends' house in Cambridge. They were a middle-aged couple with four grown up children who came and went while I was there. The house was completely jammed with books and never tidy, and they had impromptu parties. The guests included people who had been imprisoned under the apartheid regime in South Africa.

I eventually found a job at a newsagent's that was owned by a Bangladeshi family. Since it was right in the middle of Cambridge it also sold a lot of souvenirs. Behind the counter there was a wonderfully tiny, creaky staircase that led down to a basement full of shadowy little rooms that were chock-full of merchandise. I'll never forget the smell of the room where the sweets were stored.

I started each day by helping unwrap the newspapers that had just been delivered, and then spent a lot of time scurrying around keeping up the stock of things like souvenir T-shirts. I also got to work one of those old-fashioned cash registers that hardly exists anymore. I remember a group of elderly American tourists milling around in the shop and one of them pointing to a postcard to Princess Diana and saying loudly "I still say she's beautiful". Working-class guys would pile in during their lunch-break and queue up to buy tabloids and chocolate bars. It took me a while to realize that they hated being told the price of those things while they bought them.

I really enjoyed the unpredictability of the encounters with people in the shop - it was near the middle of Cambridge and there was a lot of random foot traffic - which is probably part of the reason why I ended up spending a good few years later on working as a street vendor.

However, eventually the newsagent family found someone permanent and fired me (it was an under-the-table job). After some pondering, wwhyte and I spent an afternoon going around cafes and restaurants and asking if they needed a piano player. Amazingly, one place did need one. So for a short time I played things like Gershwin for them. I also got a part-time job waitressing at conferences at one of the colleges that was a little out of town. We were taught to balance plates along our arms. That work was stodgy and hard on the feet.

Since I was paying nothing for accommodation and very little for board, I was able to save up a little money and was looking for something to spend it on. nhw introduced me to his friend manjushra, who was planning on going inter-railing that September, and we arranged to go together.

We did the classic inter-rail thing of travelling by night and wandering around cities by day, with the result that I was completely knackered much of the time. But still it's a good memory, although I cringe when I think of my general immaturity and some of the things I said to manjushra that were distinctly unfair, particularly to do with the way we were spending money.

It was the only time I've ever been to Rome and I've never been back to Venice since. We had a truly odd adventure in Tuscany which I'll write about some other time. We also went to Vienna for a day and bought a very smelly cheese in a supermarket there which we hefted all around Vienna with us and then left behind on a bench in the station.

Then we went up to the north of Germany, by the coast where manjushra knew some hospitable people who put us up for a few days. She stayed on there and I went down to the Netherlands and visited the place where I had lived with my family ten years before, which was very strange. Everything had shrunk.

When I got back to Ireland, things were just beginning to heat up in Eastern Europe but it all seemed very unreal. I thought it was some kind of aberrant episode, like an epileptic fit.

My parents had a small party at the end of October for my birthday to which some family and a few friends were invited. The friends included mylescorcoran and inuitmonster. (I must have met accentmonkey sometime in the course of that year but I must admit I can't remember when. I also met artw during the summer in Cambridge but didn't get to know her until some time later). It was the first birthday I'd had in a long time where I felt truly glad to be getting older. I'd got a feeling of what it was like to be an adult and it certainly beat being a teenager.

As I mentioned above, earlier on I'd had some fairly grandiose notions of how I was going to spend my year off. Well, I actually ended up being really bold and daring and spending the remaining two months of 1989 in....wait for it....rural County Wexford. A distant relative who worked there as an accountant for farmers and other rural businesses, and a piano teacher, needed an assistant.

In fact this turned out to be more interesting than I'd expected, and it's an episode in my life I find myself thinking about surprisingly often - much more than, say, the au-pairing job I had the following year, or my time at Trinity. For one thing, I'd never really spent a concentrated amount of time in the country before. It took me a while to adjust to how slow and quiet everything seemed but eventually I began enjoying it. I was thrown back on my own resources a lot.

While my employer gave piano lessons in the diningroom I would sit by the fire in the livingroom and chat with the parents of the music pupils. One woman told me her life story in detail, which made a big impression on me.

I was terrible at the work, which required neatness and attention to detail, but my employer was patient. The house was very calm and I became good friends with my employer's disabled husband, who I had never really got to know properly before. I also got to take lots of walks in the beautiful winter fog. All of these things helped to firm up a notion that I'd had for some time: that I might enjoy living in the country.

At Christmas I went back to Dublin. It was my father's last Christmas - although none of us knew that at the time - so it's a bit sad that I don't remember more of it.

So all in all this was a very eventful year for me. I doubt that I'd have half as much to write about most other years of my life.