A warming spring sun bathed the school that morning. Birds sang outside, in tune it seemed with the happy melodies of the learning going on within. It was good to be alive, to be here with that joyous inspiration that is the young generation of primary-school pupils. Into this happy milieu, however, entered the cigire ceantair.
He breezed in the gate, clutching his omnipresent leather-bound notebook that we called his Sunday Missal. In a tan safari-suit that fitted him better on his promotion half a dozen years ago, he was dressed more appositely for Karachi than Kilkenny. And, to complete the incongruity, his greetings were always in mellifluous Donegal Irish.
Those of us at the front of the school viewed his approach rather as a colony of bees greeted the entrance to their hive of a foraging rodent.
Now, any school worth its salt will have a series of pre-selected codes that signal from teacher to teacher the presence of an interloping inspector. In our case, the teacher who first spotted him became automatically our AWAC and was consequently faoi geasa to appraise the rest of us of his approach. A recondite encrypted note was scribbled out and given to a doughty "reliable" who was entrusted to sweep around the other classrooms in fire and forget mode, asking the innocuous question "Has anyone borrowed the Dineen dictionary?"
That straight away put all classes on a red-alert condition.
The morning nervously ticked on but, by twenty to eleven, he was still reported as being in the office with the priomhoide. So far, so good - the principal was earning his allowance by stalling his master with the Gaeilge or - more likely - the golf.
At quarter to eleven, The Sandwiches came. They did very morning around this time and The Sandwiches, a bucolic Brit in his sixties, sauntered back out over the yard a minute later.
Break-time was approaching and was always heralded by an announcement over the Intercom from an embattled principal "The sandwiches are here for collection." This morning, however, he surpassed himself by making his utterance in Irish. but, somewhere along the line, his cerebellum got involved in a bit of code-switching, as the bi-linguists call it, and he mangled the pronouncement by inserting "bullain" for "buloga" - an understandable enough thing to do under the circumstances.
"Ta na bullain san oifig faoi lathair," he manfully proclaimed. We all wondered why, indeed, there bullocks in the office.
We sat down to our beverages at the break, everybody but everybody in knots at the strange diktat. When the laughter subsided somewhat, the Wag was in.
"He didn't get it all wrong, you know," he drawled, "he just got confused on the first vowel." How wonderfully adaptive indeed is language, in all its nuances.
