(I,3) Trinity College Dublin 1970-1974

In November of my second year T, B, G M and myself went for a weekend to Mayo. We went for a walk up a mountain right by the sea. As we started the climb on the long sloping shoulder of the mountain, the weather closed in and it started to rain. It was freezing cold at the top and when we reached the summit it started to snow and blow a howling gale. By this time we were all thoroughly soaked and cold and realized that we had not come prepared for the winter weather on the mountain. We just had raincoats and shoes rather than boots and overcoats. At the summit we realized that the wind was increasing and roaring in from the sea at our backs and that it was not feasible to go back down the way we had ascended.

In panic and desperation we did all the wrong things; we split up into two groups and both went down the mountain on the leeward side slithering, sliding and bumping our way down an increasingly steep slope. At one point I remember sheltering in the lee of a protuberance watching the wind whistle through a gully – and knowing that I had to go through the gully to get down. I waited for the fierce gusts of wind to ebb and then lunged through the gully just managing to maintain my balance.

It was a close thing. We made it to the bottom and somehow found that the other pair had also made it. We headed to a local pub where we were given newspapers to put round our bodies undernearth our clothes. A roaring fire and some hot whisky warmed us up. This was followed by a couple of pints of Guinness. All our trials were soon forgotten.

But I never forgot the lesson. Be prepared for bad the weather in the mountains!

G M was another friend I had made in the genetics department. G was a genuine supernerd.He was a student in the Genetics department and had a great mathematical and computer brain –among other things.

He was also unassuming and humble and had a wry sense of humour. He had a long beard and looked a bit like Santa Claus with a black rather than a white beard. I spent hours and hours discussing all the subjects under the sun with Gary. And that was exactly why I liked him-he was prepared to discuss any subject at all. In fact when I stopped talking –which was rare –he would continue the discussion or start another one. On Satudsay evenings I would spend long evenings with him in O’Neill’s pub in Capel Street discussing religion, politics and philosophy over three or sometimes four pints of Guinness.

At the end of the second year (1972) I spent the summer with ‘Crowhead”.

This kept me from going insane. David was a source of stability in my unstable life, and he prevented me from sliding into the abyss of depression. I remember driving home from Lurgan where he lived one night feeling elated after an animated discussion on religion, education and politics. Such discussions were my drug –my alcohol.

The first vacation in 1971 at Trinity was the time when I took my first trip overseas.

I went to Morocco on a bus trip through France and Spain. I went on my own as it turned out, although I hadn’t planned it that way. My friend had dropped out at the last moment.

I even got as far as the Sahara in Morocco. That really impressed me. My love affair with Africa began on this trip.

I was saved from drowning on a beach in Morocco by a lifeguard . I had been learning how to surf with some friends. They had given up looking for waves but I stayed on. I didn’t realize I was being towed out by a current. I was carried out far into the ocean.
Without my glasses I couldn’t see the shore. I waved my arm in desperation and as fortune would have it, the lifeguard saw me and swam out and dragged me in to the beach.

I was very sick on the beach and thoroughly chastened by the experience.

Anyway, sometime during my first year at Trinity College Dublin I became obsessed with education itself. This was the beginning of a love - hate relationship which hasn’t ended yet. This would have to been one of the shortest chapters in the book mainly because there is not much to say about the teaching of the lecturers T.C.D. except that most of them were spectacularly boring. I have an image of droning Geology and Botany Lecturers, with hands in pockets , eyes averted from their audience and talking out loud to themselves, regurgitating dry textbooks of Geomorphology and Botany with barely concealed disinterest in for their students. These poor gentlemen-because there were no ladies in those days - clearly hated what they were doing as much we did listening to them. In the end I stopped going to many lectures and asked my friends who had the fortitude to attend for the page references and studied them up later in the Library. What a waste of everyone’s time –and the taxpayers money in those days as we were on government grants!

There were exceptions of course: there was Lecturer J K in the Geography Department who became orgasmically enthusiastic about about obscure topics such as “Nearest neighbour distances and the network theory of human settlement patterns”

His students rather unkindly speculated that his enthusiasm, like all enthusiasms in our opinion, was a substitute for sex. Probably because we didn’t have any enthusiasms or sex ourselves, his (enthusiasm) was contagious and by the end of the year he had us all fooled into believing that geography was a science and that human settlement patterns were predictable by mathematical calculation. To be fair, he certainly appeared to believe it himself . I am reminded of the famous statement attributed to Hitler that if you wanted to fool the masses you had to tell them a really big lie –not a small one. What a load of crap ‘nearest neighbour distances’ was.

No, J wasn’t lieing ; we were just enthused by his approachability and more power to him for that. J was a nice bloke–really rather shy at heart.

One of the Zoology lecturers, I can’t remember his name now, was a hopeless lecturer but did make the occasional joke when he wasn’t hung over. He was well-known for his friendliness with students –but generally only when he was drinking in the Lincoln Inn on a Saturday night. When he was sober he was pretty stiff. Still, is it not fascinating that he was regarded as an oddball for socializing so much with undergraduate students? How times have changed. Now the oddball would be the lecturer who doesn’t socialize with his students. Indeed it would be regarded as a professional weakness or even unprofessional if you didn’t socialise with them! I remember his name now –it was F J.

Another Zoology Lecturer B W was another interesting case. Standard boring as a Lecturer he was quite personable and approachable as a person. At the end of my third year at T.C.D. I was so fed up with studying and so obsessed with education (in the theoretical sense –as in abolishing schools as proposed by Illich in ‘Deschooling society’, and impatient to go to Africa to do Voluntary Service Overseas )

I was seriously considering giving up University and not doing my fourth ‘Honours’ year. I had built myself up to making the momentous decision to leave when I decided I would ask for BW.s advice. He calmly persuaded me that it would be a foolish thing to do.(to leave T.C.D.)

I took his advice and stayed for an enjoyable final year-and then did my V.S.O. I remember one other incident involving BW which is noteworthy. We were on a zoology fieldtrip in Portaferry for a few days. The evenings were spent jollifying in the Pub and one night my friend K2 and I were returning to our dormitory style rooms when K2, a little the worse for wear, decided to render some ditty in a boisterous manner at the top of his voice. Unfortunately for the hapless K2 , normally a quiet man, B W appeared at exactly the wrong moment. He tore strips of K2 and I saw a side of B W which I didn’t like. He reverted to the schoolmaster mode and told K2 off as if he were a primary school pupil. No doubt of course that K2 was out of order but BW was over the top too. K2 was at least twenty-one at the time and no free-thinking, self respecting, long haired, leftwing radical (as K2 and I both proudly considered ourselves to be ) was going to let himself be treated like that by a lecturer. Not in the seventies anyway. A generally easy going K2 never forgave him for humiliating him in public. in front of me. He was really stung by B W’s tirade and never forgave him.

G D was an exceptional man. He was a Cambridge graduate and spoke like one ( with plums in his mouth). He was extremely kind and generous , madly eccentric in his ways and mannerisms and everyone (well, not quite everyone) loved him. He was the head of the Genetics Department and also the Dean of student discipline. I was one of only six final year Honours genetics students –and I would have to say that I ‘almost’ enjoyed my final year at Trinity.

I was terrified of G D –in the sense that I was in awe of him. He was the original nutty professor. During the final year the students were protesting about everything from grants, Northern Ireland, to the food in the cafeteria. I took part in a ‘sit-in’ protest at the buffet one day and GD had to ‘Deal with’ it.

As I was coming out of the cafeteria he met me coming in. It is a measure of the man that he never held my participation in such ‘subversive’ activities against me in any way at allin the genetics department.

At the end of the year he asked me if I wanted to do a PhD and I declined saying I wanted to be a teacher! He later asked me would I like to go to Cambridge? It was a measure of the man (myself , that is) that I also declined this offer . This was mainly because I thought the Cambridge PGCE program was full of failed Rugby players, which of course it was. With the arrogance of youth I announced with disdain that I wanted to be part of the most “Progressive” PGCE program in the UK available at that time - at Bristol University.

Halcyon days!