And so it begins. Again, rather like the Long Handicappers on Captain's Day, we set out full of optimism and with a spring in our communal steps.

Inevitably, though, if we're not in a drain on the first hole, we certainly will be before finishing the second.

For weeks now, neighbours and acquaintances have been making remarks like "sure, it must be desperate going back after . . . how long is it - three months?" Since mid-July, there was no comfort even in going into town.

Everywhere, but everywhere, hoardings rose up, spectre-like, with foreboding back-to-school adverts. Teacher baiting: there really should be a law against it.

So on the first morning, you went over the top and there's no turning back now. That first great ice-breaking kaffeeklatsch - a roomful of new people, totally unfamiliar.

Sure, the identities are the same as last June, but, aside from this, they're all quare and different.

One is blessing the summer weather just past. Sure it is Ireland, after all, he avers, not bloody Cyprus. And d'ya know, they had the most godawful drought in Cyprus, water rationed to three hours every three days, and me with the best crop of peas since '68.

Aye, Longford was in the semi against Kerry that year . . .

"Rubbish" comes the cry from, shall we say, the opposition benches. The spokesperson for Cypriot weather, tanned like a harmonium-top, sallies forth with a new spin on the story. In northern Cyprus now . . . where was I? . . . in the Turkish part . . . we had lashings of the stuff.

You could shower from dawn 'til dusk if you had a mind to.

You know then that that first morning back is the latter-day proof that Heraclitus was right: everything is in a constant state of flux. Last term's antagonists are now cosying up, the lion layeth down with the lamb, while our erstwhile sot has clearly procured a new razor and raison d'etre and - after a great holiday in Mayo - now looks, well, a million roubles anyway.

Ah, the bell, the bell . . . and on the way back to the classroom, you wonder if or how you have changed in the intervening months. Are you now more the luminary or the lumpkin, compulsive or constrained, more the upbeat than plain deadbeat?

And, of course, if Heraclitus, who so scorned others and would definitely not go to any staffroom of his day, ever got to see his lumpsum.