Diary – 26 May 2006

Turning 41, an anonymous age if ever there was one, I found myself back at the school I went to three centuries ago — or so it seems. The occasion was a memorial to a favourite teacher. Neil Laing taught English and died young, at 56. The chapel of Epsom College was full of people in various stages of physical collapse whom I realised, on closer inspection, were the same age as me. We never thank our teachers, and here we were, belatedly, thanking him.

He would throw open the windows of his classroom and thunder his enthusiasm for literature and life; a lesson on Paradise Lost would suddenly switch into an appreciation of Erica Roe. He coached hockey and rugby but encouraged the misfits, like me, who were good at neither. Laing was, we were reminded, the only housemaster who gave colours (a striped tie) for things other than sport — unfashionable pursuits like acting or bridge.