​When I was at school, one of my favourite poems was “Per Iter Tenebricosum” by Oliver St. John Gogarty (Along The Dark Way) (see the first photo below).  It talks about the inevitability of death and it being “a fate that leads the natural way”.  I always thought it odd that even the most practical, organised people went through life acting as if death would never happen to them.   A couple of years later when I started working in an accountancy firm, I saw at first hand the upset and trauma 

One of my favourite songs is by the late Sandy Denny, “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”.  I find that I’m asking myself that very question a lot lately ……. a real sign that “I’m shoving on”.  But I was really thinking of this song a lot leading up to last month’s Greenhill Class of ’83 40th Reunion.

Written when the singer was just 19, just a couple of years older than most of us leaving Greenhill, this plaintive song has been covered extensively down through the years.  But I love the version here released in 1973.  It really pulls at the heartstrings and some regard it as “one of the saddest songs ever written”.

For us leaving school in 1983 it was indeed a sad time on the jobs front. John F. Kennedy on his presidential visit to Ireland in June 1963 twenty years earlier had remarked ‘Most countries send