It's here again. Back-to-school, that peculiar mini-season in late August which the Elmer's glue people look for-ward to with undisguised glee. Got nothing to do with you, you say? You're an adult, with a job, and a life, and all that? Tsk, tsk.

It has been a long summer, hasn't it? Don't tell me you've forgotten the words of our old schoolmaster so soon.

"Education never ends, Watson," he told that rather slow fellow in the front row.  "It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last."

You heard it. Summer's over, time to quit mucking about in the great outdoors and hit the books. Pack the kids off to Violet Hunter's private school in Walsall (where the school song is "Here We Come A-Walsalling"), move the comfy chair into the little attic room where you've been building the library, and get on with your education.

Of course, if you're not feeling par- ticularly motivated to study consulting detection, research Phoenician tin traders, or experiment with bisulphate of beryl-stapleton, education may be the furthest thing from your mind. Summer may be over, but you still just want to have fun, right? Whatever it was Holmes said, for most of us, life breaks down into that unending dichotomy of work and fun. If it ain't work, it should be fun. And with all the non-work, non-fun items that already invade your existence, why add one more?

So how do you remain a true student of the master detective, continuing your education while having fun at the same time?

The Sherlockian workshop. They aren't too common in winter or spring (too many people either gearing up for or recovering from the big New York weekend in January), and while you doencounter them in summer, the time they really pop up these days is autumn. And this autumn is no exception. In fact, an ambitious Sherlockian could spend the entire season going from workshop to workshop (perhaps this could be an alternate lifestyle choice for fans of the Grateful Dead, left adrift since Jerry Garcia's recent passing).

Just look at this calendar of scheduled (and rumored to be scheduled) workshops:

September 16-17
The Seventh International Holmesian Games, in Vancouver.
Canonical Convocation and Caper, in Door County, Wis.

October 7-8
The Game's Afloat III! in St. Charles, Mo.
STUD'S 141st Birthday Party for Sherlock Holmes, in Michigan City, Ind.

October 13-15
The Detective and the Collector, in Minneapolis.

October 28-29
Autumn in Baker Street, in Tarrytown, N.Y.
14th Annual Weekend with Sherlock Holmes, in Baltimore.

November 18-19
The Fourth Sherlock Holmes Review Symposium, in Indianapolis.

You couldn't attend all of them if you wanted to. And would you want to? Eventually you would start running into repetition of theme and subject matter, one would think. Even if you didn't, there is only a certain depth that can be reached in a single weekend. Sooner or later the desire to dig deeper emerges. A hunger for fewer banquets and more libraries. A craving to move from second-hand tellings to first-hand experience. At which point you're on your own again.

And that is how it should be. One of the major appeals of Sherlock Holmes is that of the self-made man. He didn't just make his fortune, he invented his career. He gathered his own curriculum and decided upon his own graduation requirements, not from ego, but because he was the only one who knew what he had to do. He wasn't just his own boss, he was his own career counsellor.

He decided what institutions could offer him, what books could offer him, and what the local butcher shop could offer him. He found education everywhere, and put it to good use. When you find education everywhere, some of those spots wind up being very enjoyable, too.

Take coal tar derivatives, for example. It's one of my personal favorites in the studies of Sherlock Holmes. Doesn't sound like much fun, does it? Kind of yuck-o, actually. But suppose you were studying coal tar derivatives on the southern coast of France like Holmes did?

Education never ends, my friend. And while it's true, after a long, hard summer of indulgence, a person has a hard time returning to the classroom — perhaps it's just a matter of where you choose that classroom to be.

You can learn a lot from Sherlock Holmes. Well, back to school.