My bag had remained closed and intact, which was lucky as it was bulging with a vocabulary test I had to mark for the next day – it’s part of what we do to children these days, test them at the beginning of the year to make the ones who are having a hard time feel really rubbish about themselves right from the start. Sometimes, as I walked home, I clutched folders of students’ work in my arms, to save overloading my bag – if I’d been doing that, the spelling attempts of 9R would have been on their way to Longthorpe wrapped round the wheels of a passing articulated lorry.

I limped home. I felt sorry for myself. I put my foot up on the sofa with a bag of frozen sweetcorn wrapped in a tea towel as I ate dinner in front of the television. I felt a bit sick again. I went to bed early.

The next morning, I pushed back the duvet and sat up and stared at my ankle. There were combinations of green and purple on my foot that I had never seen before and it was twice its natural size.

I rang Adrian, my Head of Department. ‘Sounds like it’s broken,’ he said, glumly. ‘Have you tried putting any weight on it?’

‘I had to hop to the bathroom,’ I said.

‘Oh God,’ he sighed. ‘If you’re going to be on crutches I’ll to have to look into moving your classroom.’ He wasn’t an unsympathetic man, he was actually a very good Head of Department, but we were only two weeks into the new school year. My timing couldn’t have been worse. ‘Get it checked out and call me back as soon as you can.’

I got a minicab to the City Care Centre – £6.50 for a journey I could have walked in less than ten minutes if I could have walked at all. I felt mightily sorry for myself sitting in the waiting room of the Minor Injuries Unit. I was even sorrier when an X-ray revealed the ankle wasn’t broken, just sprained and ‘very badly bruised’ and I wasn’t going to have a cast to show for it. They told me to go home and rest for a few days with the ankle in the air.