Herr Hogg.

Over the past few weeks I keep seeing my old German teacher Mr Hogg about the town – and what I find most extraordinary about this is he doesn’t look a bit different.

I think I left secondary school in about 1997. You’d would expected some sort of aging to have taken place with Mr Hogg in the intervening years, but it hasn’t; he also taught my friend Steve’s father in the mid-Sixties - and apparently looked exactly the same then too.

He must have made a deal with the Devil (or, as he'd say: “Der Teufel”). I guess some people just start out looking middle-aged – and then their birthdate starts to catch up with their looks.

Mr Hogg was an excellent teacher, but one hell of a character. What you noticed first were his eyebrows; they must have been modeled on Dennis Healey’s, as they stuck out a good couple of inches from his face. If he’d walked into the classroom slow enough, you would have seen them poking around the door frame for a good long while before you saw the rest of him.

Not that he ever entered slowly. He would burst into the classroom like the Tasmanian Devil; yanking the revolving blackboard so violently that it spun upon its rollers, before going at it with the board-rubber like a maniac. He’d then throw the rubber in the direction of its little allotted shelf, missing every time – and turn to address the class in a frighteningly severe manner.

He spoke in German throughout the class. Even if someone knocked on the classroom door during the lesson; he would shout “HEREIN” in response, obviously working on the assumption that anyone who wished to visit him must have at least a basic grasp of the language.

I sat next to my friend Steve for all of our German lessons – and despite Mr Hogg’s strict manner, we somehow managed to get away with chatting on most occasions. We once spent the best part of a term compiling a list of 101 things you could do with a turnip; scribbling alternating ideas into my school rough book, with a little cartoon illustration accompanying each one.

There was one particularly memorable occasion when Steve was on the receiving end of Mr Hogg’s wrath; on failing to respond quick enough to whatever question was asked of him in German (we obviously weren’t paying much attention), Mr Hogg shouted exasperatingly, “Go, Steve. RUN AROUND THE BLOCK.”

It made for an extremely surreal punishment – one that seemingly only the two of us were aware of; the class continued as if nothing untoward had happened, whilst I looked out of the first floor window, watching Steve as he circled around the building.

Despite our turnip-drawing and lap-running, we both came out the other side of our GCSE German classes pretty favourably: I managed to scrape by with a B. I have Mr Hogg to thank for that.

The last time I saw him was a couple of days ago, when he was walking his dog across a playing field at the back of my flat with his wife. The dog wasn’t behaving – and Mr Hogg was shouting at him to sit in the exactly the same manner that he used to address our class.

Perhaps he should have tried “setzen” instead.