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Double maths or games? That's an easy one.

For my first 5 years at Longslade, PE and games consisted of being at the whim of psychotics whose pleasure was to find the most inappropriate activity for the prevailing weather conditions. The gym had one side open, and we would find ourselves in vests and shorts playing basketball in 3 feet of snow, or when the teacher ran out of ideas (and given that the average PE teacher has an IQ in the same range as petunias and decapitated earthworms, that was frequently) we were sent on cross country runs while he tried to work out which end of his whistle to blow.

The lessons culminated in showers. Some might relish the prospect of being herded into showers with sullen, naked adolescent boys, but I have to confess it did not much appeal to me. In the sixth form we did, indeed, have 'games' on a Wednesday afternoon.

Having been dismissed as a prospect for the England Olympic squad, those of us lacking enthusiasm, ability and co-ordination were left to our own devices. I chose badminton as being the soft option. On one Wednesday I chose to go the cinema instead, and watched Mr Lindsey Anderson's rather splendid documentary "If". It culminated in the gunning down of the staff; parents and governors on Speech day by a group of schoolboys who seemed to bear some sort of grudge. It also featured a character with the same surname as me, who, coincidentally, was also extraordinarily pretty.

So, give me maths any day, of whatever variety, double, treble, or to the power N. Messrs and Mesdames Dickinson, Wadsley and Lewis may have believed that the guff that they expounded served some purpose, and may even have found it interesting, but to most of us it was just a backdrop to having somewhere warm and dry to sit, whilst the agonising years of puberty passed by, and provided some respite from having to pretend to play rugby in a swamp.