Go on, say it Ann. I know you’re dying to,” says Geraldine.

“Say what?”

“I told you so, or something like that.”

“Ah stop that now. You’d swear I was delighted about it. I wasn’t going to say that I told you so at all.”

Well, I was actually. Freya made a pure hames of the Junior Cert and now there’s a bit of a tribunal about it. She was too relaxed about the whole thing. She’s a chip off the old block that way.

Her mother, Geraldine, my sister, is very relaxed as a general rule, until she gets caught out and then she starts giving out to me. And Freya was never going to be getting any sense of urgency from her father, the bould Benny Courtney.

Lightning Benny C he called himself when he was in that bit of a blues band he had on the go. Lightning was a good name for him. You’d have a better chance of seeing him at night.

Lightning Benny is long gone, although he turns up from time to time at the various family dos. I’m civil enough to him, although he knows I don’t like him.

“I’m sorry I don’t fit into your pigeon-hole Ann.” He says to me. “Creatives like me threaten your cosy world because we know that life’s not simple and controllable.”

I had him pigeon-holed alright as being red-useless. He wrote one song and got to play it on Nationwide for about 20 seconds and Mary Kennedy was all over him saying he was like a ‘Don Baker of the countryside’ and he’s been dining out on that since.

It drives me crackers the way these creative types look down on the likes of me just because we’re doing our fecking jobs and not being a total waster. And whenever he says that to me he has a can of Heineken in his hand.

But he’s family now so we’re stuck with him. So between him and her mother, ’tis no wonder Freya isn’t much minded for formal education.

“Auntie Ann,” she says to me one time. “You do know that secondary school is just a way of keeping control of the youth so that they’re ready for the industrial machine, don’t you.”

When I was her age I was reading Black Beauty. Now it’s the internet and you don’t know what they’d be soaking up.

“The world is changing and it’s not going to be about knowing the Modh Coiniollach for the Irish irregular verbs. I’ll need to know critical thinking and coding.”

“Painkillers?”

“No Aunty Ann, not codeine – coding. Writing computer code.”

Her mother doesn’t mention code or codeine as we’re leaning on her car outside EVOCATE nightclub in Drumfeakel waiting for the Junior Cert disco to end to collect Freya. Orla Farmer walks past us. She’s the special correspondent with the Kilsudgeon Sentinel. Junior Cert night is her bread and butter. She comes out looking for young wans asleep in the gutter so she can write about the scandal of underage drinking. She’s got a good three years out of it now. She might as well be on the syllabus.

“How are you Orla – a nice night to be out. Are you working?”

“Trying to ladies. ’Tis a disaster. Normally they’d be on their ear at this stage. The parents used to drop them off two hours early. What they thought was going to happen I don’t know, but they should have had a fair idea. But of course a lot of these parents wouldn’t believe their little darlings would get up to anything until they’d be down at the garda station after a traffic cone was put through a window.”

I didn’t say a word about my son Patrick’s little incident at the Twelve pubs.

“But there’s not a peep out of them this year. Maybe we should give the young lads a bit of credit after all. ’Tis the adults are the problem half the time.”

Geraldine looks at me. “Not a word Ann. I mean it.”