IT'S that time of year again, when students tout their A-level results round the country's universities in search of acceptance. Sometimes, when the grades don't turn out too well, sights have to be lowered - having dreamed of reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, teenagers end up doing Home Economics at Bangor.

I would probably have gone to university... if it weren't for a black and white dog that lived about six houses down the road from me.

It was a barking dog. It barked in the mornings, in the afternoons and - most troublesome of all - it barked in the evenings when I came home from school and got down to A-level homework.

And when it wasn't barking, it was howling like some coyote on the soundtrack of a Spaghetti Western.

As the menace of approaching A-levels grew nearer, I spent hours revising in my bedroom, with just the occasional break to listen to Radio Luxembourg. Remember Radio Luxembourg, with Horace Batchelor, who reckoned you could win a fortune on the pools, but for some reason chose not to do so himself? Instead, he spent his days on a weak-signalled radio station, telling you to send your inquiries to Keynsham "spelled K.E.Y.N..." etc.

And so, in the periods between Horace and the blossoming pop industry of the late 1950s and early 1960s, I gave myself to the study of French and English Literature. In fact, I gave myself to the study twice. Two years in the sixth form brought the brown results envelope one August morning - two A-levels, but nowhere near good enough to get me to university.

The most tolerant mum and dad in the world agreed that I could put off the evil day when I had to think about going to work - they would keep me in food and the occasional gallon of petrol for my motor-bike, and I would go back to school for a year to re-take the exams. And that meant really putting the work in

Which was when the dog really started barking.

I got quite irrational about it. After tea and The Archers, I would head upstairs, shut the bedroom door and set about Hamlet or Moliere. But I was waiting for the yapping to begin.

And it would. Yap yap, yap yap. Brief pause. Yap yap, yap yap. Another pause. Repeat the four-yap sequence on, and on, and on.

I stuffed pieces of rolled up toilet tissue in my ears, and sat trying to concentrate on Hamlet's paranoia, or Keats and his nightingale, with my head in my hands and my thumbs pressed against the wads of tissue in my ears.

But still the distant dog filtered through. Yap yap, yap yap. The damned dog could even count and was barking in pairs. It barked until it was hoarse and then it barked some more.

My anger finally boiled over one hot summer evening. I left the well-balanced Wordsworth, who wrote that he recalled his emotions in tranquillity (he should be so lucky) and stormed down the road to the dog's house.

"You stupid bloody animal!" I yelled at it. "What the hell are you trying to do to me?" It ran excitedly around in tight circles, barking, of course.

"SHUT UP!!" I screamed through the gate.

This brought the owners out. They were not, as I had suspected, profoundly deaf, but profoundly daft.

I yelled at them, too, all about my A-levels and my hopes of going to university and their dog's part in it all. I heard myself inserting the most awful obscenities in between the words. "Well," said the woman, "so that's the sort of language they teach you at grammar school!" and she went inside.

The dog barked on. I did pass French and English again, but the grades were even worse than the first time, and it was time to go out into the big wide world.