mostly david ephgrave

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 g...

Yesterday, whilst reading an excellent opinion piece by Alice Thomson in The Times , I learnt that the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, is proposing to remove English Literature from the core GCSE curriculum. If Gove’s reforms are accepted, students will be expected to study a newly-reworked English exam focusing primarily on use of language, alongside Maths, one of the sciences, a modern language and either History or Geography – with English Literature relegated to an optional extra. Frankly, I’m terrified. I have been an avid reader since junior school – and it was my English Literature classes at secondary school that first introduced me to the classics. I showed very little interest in the likes of Shakespeare at first; it wasn’t until I went on to study it at A-Level and then at drama school that I was bitten by the bug – but if it wasn’t for those initial classes I might never have felt the need to get around to it. ...