Matty – the slap of the sudden. It happened on a wet path. Sometimes, just before you trip and fall, you can feel it about to happen and there is a moment to brace as you lose balance. In this case, there was none. One second, I was striding home after work, hurrying and hungry, my mind on the girl in my new Year Nine class who, I had just been informed, was dyslexic – Suranne, she was called. It was only the second week of the academic year. I was still adjusting to the new class, and they to me, but I had found Suranne rude and sullen from the off and was now struggling to adjust my dislike of her in the wake of what I had been told about her learning difficulties. This is the way it goes in teaching: they are difficult and you don’t like them, you find out there’s a good reason for them being difficult and then you struggle not only with their difficulties but with your own dislike. I was thinking how it was obvious that other, as yet undiagnosed, issues accompanied her dyslexia, but I was also thinking that explained only some of her rudeness and sullenness. It is, after all, perfectly possible to have learning difficulties and be a right little cow.

This was an entirely inappropriate thought for an experienced secondary school teacher to be having, particularly in September. The following July was an awfully long way away, after all. I was just noting my own wrongness to myself when all at once, as if to confirm it, I was flying sideways, as swiftly as if a hand had reached out from the grass verge as I strode down Thorpe Road and grabbed me by the ankle and yanked my feet from under me. Some thin layer of mulch, that was all it was, some slime made of the leaves that had fallen recently, flattened to invisibility by the many feet that had walked along the path that autumn day. I landed soundly on one side, my right arm, shoulder and hip sharing the impact. It was the left ankle that landed most heavily, though, on the inside, slamming down and bouncing off a raised piece of pavement with such force that the pain caused a moment of blackness in my head, followed immediately by a wave of nausea.

Two passers-by, a middle-aged man and woman, rushed over and helped me up, one at each elbow, talking over each other and saying, ‘Are you alright?’ and ‘That was a right tumble, that was.’

‘Yes, yes, of course, I’m fine, thank you, really I’m fine …’ My primary concern in that moment was the humiliation.