Yesterday I was the keynote speaker at my secondary school’s “Celebration of Excellence” annual award ceremony. The last time I was there was in 2001 to collect my Leaving Cert results. A few weeks before that was my last time there in uniform, for our graduation mass, where the picture on the left was taken. (Turns out, 18 years later, I still have the same hair. 😂) I talked about my time there, my adventures since and then... “There’s a few things I wish someone had told me while I was still inside these walls. Getting a tattoo is NOT a good idea. You’ll be embarrassed that you had six years of French lessons, for free, but now you can barely order coffee with it – and this is especially annoying because you spend a lot of time in France and plan to buy a house there. Pay attention in language classes, girls, because you don’t yet know where your favourite place in the world is going to be. No matter what any elderly relative tells you, these are not the best days of your life. There will come a time, very soon, when you won’t have homework, when you’ll be able to wear whatever you want and you won’t have to forge notes from your mother saying you have cramps to get out of playing hockey - and then be forced to walk laps around the freezing cold pitch because your PE teacher knows it’s biologically impossible to have as many periods as you claim to. If I had my time over again, I might do things a little differently. I was really good at English – it the only thing I was really good at – but everyone told me that meant I could teach it, or I could be a journalist, and I had no interest in doing either. But there was a third option: publishing. If I had done my BA back when I was 18, I could’ve gone straight into publishing and, even if I’d never got published myself, I could’ve been around books and words and stories and it would have been a lovely second best. But if I had done that, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I wouldn’t have had my adventures, or met my friends, or watched all that Netflix. So I think, really, I wouldn’t change a thing.”
