A phone box.  A phone box in West Cork. Not one of those all glass ones. It was one of those cream and green ones. I’m sure if you scraped it really hard, you might have discovered flakes of red from the old days.

The Phone. No phone cards then..I think I had saved a handful of 50p pieces all week. West Cork to Dublin was still long distance. Then you had to put your money in, dial the number, wait to hear a voice, and then press button A. Yes children, this is how we made calls in the 1980s.

Why am I telling you this? It’s obvious. This is how I received my Leaving Cert results. I can even tell you the approximate time the call was made. It was just after 2:45pm on a Friday afternoon. The B in honours English was the first shriek. D in honours history was quietly ignored. C in honours Chemistry. God loves a crammer. The rest is a blur. One finger typing and no extra time got me through.

The call home was to Family. The week in West Cork was with a youth club. I wasn’t alone. There was a gang of us. You can guess what happens next. We behaved for the next few hours. Really.

But I was 18. There was indeed a trip to off-licences. Nagan or nagans were bought. However, we were sensible. We had our lovely West Cork Tea before festivities begun. The youth club stayed in an old agriculture college with its own farm. No lifts. Most nights local bands came in to play for the poor disabled kids down from Dublin. One of the bands was fronted by Brian Crowley before or during his gestation period as a politician. The blond curls were forming perfectly.

He was on stage that Friday night.

I had finished my nagan rather quickly and had then decided I was a plane. Oh yeah. The nagan was in my bedroom on the second floor. The band were playing on the ground floor. Thankfully there were no mid-air collisions. Though I do remember running into the band room, arms outstretched, pretending to be on a runaway. Brian kept singing.

Ah the innocence. Enjoy the night and be good.