

The past is a foreign country...
I love history. Last weekend I went for a walk on the moors above Allendale in the north Pennines and I was fascinated by the industrial ruins up there. If I’d not been a teacher I would have been an archaeologist – I was a huge Time Team fan and I’ve done a couple of online archaeology courses. I’ve recently been immersed in more recent, and more personal, history. I’m currently working on a novel set partly during the miners’ strike and the village in it is quite closel


September
It’s September. For anybody who has ever worked in education that means only one thing – back to school. I started teaching in 1990 (that makes me feel really old!) and, since then, there have been very few Septembers when I haven’t had that odd mix of dread and excitement when the first day of term rolls round. For one of those Septembers I chose the first day of term to be the day I flew to Beijing and started a ‘year off’. Another was the following year when I didn’t h