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...