GOODBYES are the Major Irritant of the Week. Here it is, my last week at the Mid-Ocean News.

I've sat at this desk for five years. Now is a good time to take stock, literally. After five years I have amassed a collection of shoes and damp socks under my desk. The socks are from wet days. Usually, I wear a pair to work in the rain, take them off and put on the pair I wore the last time it rained. Usually, (usually) they've dried by the time I put them on again.

I also have just as many books at work as I have at home. Over the past couple of weeks I've been carting the books home in a bookbag three or four at a time. My den now looks like Works & Engineering tried to prune in there (a mess).

"Can't you throw stuff out?" said my pained husband.

"But I did throw stuff out. This is what was left," was my reply.

But my collection of books at work is different from my collection at home. It's all mainly books I half read or bought and never read. Titles included a $2 paperback of Hamlet, a book about how to relate to others (obviously never read that one) and Silas Mariner.

This week I gave at least six books on how to interview to the office library. Some of them were required reading for university. Never read a one.

"These ones will come in handy for the summer students," said our librarian paging through my pile, "but I don't want the one on Ida Tarbell. Who was she anyway? She didn't do anything important. She wasn't like the first journalist or something, was she?"

There wasn't much I could say except that Ida blew the lid on Standard Oil at a time when most female journalists were still chained to the society pages. Not feeling right about throwing Ida out, I put her back in the bottom drawer of my desk. The inside of my desk is something like the average medicine cabinet. I've got decongestion pills, Tylenol, indigestion tablets (for Thursday), maxi pads, band-aids (for the sores on my feet from the shoes under my desk that don't fit right). I've also got a hair brush, tooth brush, tooth paste, allergy spray.

ON top of my desk is a clutter of objects I can't be bothered to relate. It reminds me of the time I walked past a reporter's desk at The Royal Gazette. The desk was piled high with newspapers and other odds and ends. Assuming this was the Gazette's refuse pile I said offhandedly: "Someone ought to clear off all that junk so someone can actually use that desk."

He looked at me with great offence and said: "Someone is using this desk. It's my desk."

"Oh," I said, "why don't you get a computer, then, like everyone else?"

He said: "There is a computer under there, somewhere."

Although I haven't been here very long I feel like a veteran. I've sat here at this messy desk through at least three generations of Royal Gazette reporters. I've seen reporters come and go, then come back and then go out again. I've come to the conclusion that they all come back eventually like little space ships caught in a whirling vortex.

That's why I'm not all that teary-eyed about leaving. I figure I'll come back some day. Without a doubt at some other point in my life I'll be sitting at a familiar desk covered in inky fingerprints, a sense of dread falling upon me as deadlines approach.

I'll be entering Emerson College again in September to work for a Master's degree in creative writing. I received a very nice grant from the Arts Council, and to them I am very grateful.

Many people have asked anxiously if my husband, Steven, ever got into university. As a matter of fact, he did get into a Master's programme at Boston College. In Bermuda he was short-listed for three scholarships and won the Ewan Sampson Scholarship and the Eldon Trimingham Scholarship.

This takes a major financial load off our backs. Because the Trimingham Scholarship is very generous, Steven gave up the Ewan Sampson Scholarship so that someone else could benefit from it.

But the column is not over. Sorry to the person who suggested the best way I could improve it was to stop writing it. As long as there are trials and tribulations in the world, traffic jams and badly laid-out parking, I'm still gonna write. Major Irritants is going on the road in September.

Thanks for reading and feel free to contact me at bdapoohhotmail.com