The other night, wearing a brand new dress and with freshly painted silver nails, I stood at a podium in a room filled mostly with actuaries. Me. The eejit who got a D in pass maths in the Leaving Certificate. Life surprises you sometimes.
The gathering was in Dublin’s Westbury Hotel where in the mid-1990s I’d been stood up by Roger Moore. I’d just started out in journalism and Moore was going to be my first big celebrity interview. I waited for hours, before finally spotting him as he walked up that grand staircase. I watched him have a brief word with the receptionist before taking the lift up to his suite. As with so many other young women, it appeared James Bond had forgotten all about me.
I wasn’t giving up that easily. I told a staff member and they called up to Moore’s room, but he said he was too tired to do the interview. The next morning there was, to my delight, a message on my work phone: “My dear Róisín, this is Roger Moore. I am terribly sorry for not meeting with you yesterday. Please accept my apologies. Perhaps we can do it another time.” We did actually, 12 years later in London. And we laughed that he was the Spy Who Stood Me Up.
I always think about Moore in the Westbury. Shaken and stirred, I thought of him again as I prepared to address the biennial dinner of the Society of Actuaries in Ireland. “How?” a stunned friend had texted earlier when I told her what I was about to do. “Why?”
I got a D in pass maths in the Leaving Cert but I addressed the Society of Actuaries in Ireland dinner
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Well, what happened was that a few months previously, an Italian-born actuary and reader of this column called Viviana emailed and told me about an actuarial singalong that was happening in a pub in town. It was a charming email. And I do love a good singsong. Plus, my sister Rachael, who also likes to belt out a tune, is an actuary, so on the night in question I decided to just show up. Rachael, a busy CEO, was not able to go, but the joyful reaction I got from a shocked Viviana when I walked into the pub with my ukulele was so euphoric and enthusiastic that it lifted me for days.
What do actuaries sing on a night out? You might be surprised. One of them, Kevin, knew every single word of Where’s Me Jumper? by The Sultans of Ping, so that was a definite highlight. There was a bit of Abba, a dash of Bruce Springsteen and even a sort of sea shanty.
Actuaries have a reputation for being aggressively boring – the collective noun for them is a “morbidity” of actuaries – but in my experience they are collectively, and I don’t mind going on the record with this, great craic.
Shortly after the singalong, I was asked to address the society. And for a couple of reasons – my sister was going to be there, and I wanted another invite to sing with them – I said yes. As I got stuck into my sea bass main course, I worried that my after-dinner talk was too grim. There are two certainties in life, as everybody knows, and I was planning to talk to the actuaries about one of them (not taxes). I was reassured by a glamorous actuary called Sarah. “Us actuaries love a bit of death talk,” she confided.
My speech, especially the death content, went down well. Some actuaries came up to hug me afterwards. Turns out actuaries give good hugs.
I learned a few other things that night from society president Roz Briggs. In addition to their day jobs, the actuaries are working on important issues. They are trying to address the sharp decline in girls’ performance in Leaving Cert higher level maths compared to boys. They are doing an assessment of excess deaths during the Covid pandemic and supporting Irish citizens as they budget for financial needs in retirement. They are also trying to establish a better risk management approach to the climate crisis.
Afterwards, the chief executive of the society, Grimesy, (some actuaries are such good craic they even have nicknames), tells me I am an honorary actuary now. Viviana invites me for an Italian lunch in her home. I’m looking forward to the next actuarial singing night when I’m hoping to get them to do a version of Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World, just so I can hear them sing, “Don’t know much trigonometry, Don’t know much about algebra, Don’t know what a slide rule is for”.
On my way home I wonder if it might be happening, that I am going to stop hating maths. “I’m bad at maths,” I’ve always said, but in my preparation for the actuarial event I’d come across a book called Is Maths Real? How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics’ Deepest Truths, by Eugenia Cheng. She believes that the way maths is taught is wrong, and actually contributes to an anti-maths culture. “If you think of yourself as belonging to the ‘bad at ...’ camp,” she says, “it’s not because you failed maths. It’s because maths failed you.”
Of course, they don’t use the word fail any more for State exams. A teenage boy of my acquaintance got 29 per cent in the Junior Cert mocks and his result read “partially achieved”.
“Partially achieve, partially achieve better,” as Beckett would likely never have said. Don’t know much about algebra, it’s true. But I could. I might. You never know. Life surprises you sometimes.
