My Primary school was really good in the village I grew up in, but I made the mistake of passing the 11+ and attended one of those institutions known as a "Boys' Grammar School". The qualification to be a teacher there was to have a degree from Oxford or Cambridge, to have some kind of speech impediment which rendered them incomprehensible, and to have some degree of mental or sexual aberration.

Just to give a taste of what was on offer, we had two music teachers who were both deaf. When meeting up with an old friend some years after leaving he offered the observation:-"Basicallly, we were educated by a load of nutters, weren't we?"

There were a couple of really brilliant exceptions; an English teacher who made King Lear seem as if it was happening in the 20th century, and an ex-army major who gave me a lifelong love of history.