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

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