There is nothing special about me which is almost certainly why I became a teacher. It’s not a bad job if you avoid inner city schools. A leafy suburb, an affluent market town or a rural village usually provide safe environments, by which I mean classes full of tame students. At training college I had a cynically wise tutor. “I have just two tips,” he advised when the time came for me to apply for jobs. “Don’t ever get too close to your students and never pretend to yourself that you’ve got a social conscience.”

“But I do have a social conscience,” I retorted and he smiled sarcastically. “Sort of,” I moderated my claim.

“Exactly,” he said. “Sort of is a cheap elastic band. It snaps when you stretch it. You are morally lazy, Barry. Take my word. Most of us are. It’s not a fatally defining fault. You are more than academically capable. You are a good communicator. But you are definitely not a Mandela or a Gandhi or even an Esther Rantzen for that matter.”

Five years followed, plying my trade in a council estate comp whose location had been the home of two notorious child murderers. The last three of these I had spent trying to escape, casting my CV indiscriminately in an ever widening circle across the British Isles before a sixth form college in the Welsh Borderlands eventually gobbled up the bait. A sleepy agricultural community that had a lingering whiff of burnt apples about it, that contemporary debates on the nature of multiculturalism and gender identity had simply passed its inhabitants by unnoticed. I hooked up with the daughter of a local solicitor and settled in for the long haul. Where once in my professional life only rough edges and reluctance existed, now I floated gently within an ethereal lagoon of compliance. My professional status had moved at a stroke from the detested to the demiurge.

Physics and Maths are my subject specialisms. They are not soft subjects. No students choose to do them at an advanced level who have not thought hard about their career direction. I have always considered the Humanities misnamed. They are a porous and flabby option, to which the wayward and the dull migrate, assuming they will be spoon fed through the syllabus rather than required to wrestle with complex and elusive concepts. My subjects demand empirical rigour and curiosity. They sit at the cutting edge of our knowledge about reality. At least I have always believed so. Obviously in staff rooms and the like I keep this opinion to myself. It is hardly one that endears me to those who work in the liberal arts subjects and who configure subjectivity as the gateway to that mythic place known in vulgar parlance as growth and enlightenment. I am with Menken on this when he writes, “It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.”

So another five years passed. My wife Helena gave birth to two children. The principal of our college expressed occasional gratification at the pattern of my students’ results, several of whom had been awarded scholarships to Oxbridge colleges. One day he took me aside and offered an apology that I had not yet been offered a promotion. This took me by surprise. “We don’t wish to lose you, Barry,” he said almost as if he had been alerted to a gang of headhunters hard on my tail. “Your name came up at the last governors’ meeting as a possible replacement for Carl Jenkins who will be leaving us at Easter. If you were to take over his part-time function as counsellor it would enable us to elevate you to a second tier salary scale.”

He led me into his private office to avoid the ears and glances of itinerant colleagues. I had never thought of myself as possessing counselling skills or even understanding what they were, I confessed to our head honcho, but he simply waved this objection away. “I will send you on a part-time training course,” he explained. “The nub is this. We have an elderly staff here and you are much closer in age and therefore in cultural nouse to our students than anyone else. You ‘ve always struck me as eminently approachable. Anyway, think about it over the weekend.”

Helena thought I’d be daft to reject the offer. Our living expenses had inflated as young children do not come cheap even in the sticks. So I took the bait, attended an evening class run by the BACP for secondary teachers and got used to finding an extra £185 per month magically appear in my bank account. The deal with the principal amounted to this. Lose six hours each week of class contact time. Gain five hours to deal with requests and referrals for counselling. Boys only, of course. Girls with mental health issues went to my colleague Beryl, a spinster and music specialist with a penchant for Wagnerian opera. Some weeks nobody disturbed me and I was left in peace to twiddle my thumbs. Naturally the peak periods of activity happened at examination times. Certain students suffered from disillusionment or ennui; others experienced domestic problems due to warring or divorced parents. My established technique became to listen carefully without interrupting until the individual ran out of steam. Only then would I ask questions.

However it is not my intention to provide here a condensed overview of the counselling fodder that passed me by or the pedagogic methodologies I employed. I want to concentrate on one particular student called Murray Cheung. According to the teacher who referred the youth, Mr Lowther, one of the senior Humanity’s course tutors, Murray exuded intelligence well beyond his years. He was studying History, Politics and English and for the duration of his first college year had never graded lower than A minus for any essay across all three subjects. In fact Lowther had been so impressed he had already singled Murray out to join the elite Oxbridge entry caucus of high flyers before the first year exams had been taken. Such boldness was unprecedented. The select group, who rarely numbered more than five, received privileged instruction, the curriculum of which equated to roughly third year undergraduate standard. In layman’s terms, therefore, Murray had been identified as intellectually five years ahead of the average sixteen year old.

But Lowther had jumped the gun. In the end of year June exams Murray had only narrowly passed his History exam with a grade E and failed the other two. His written answers were far too short and dislocated in their content, several abandoned in mid-sentence unfinished, and it appeared to Lowther in consultation with his fellow subject tutors that the boy had either frozen or panicked. One other possibility occurred to the wily old senior course adjudicator, namely that someone else had written all Murray’s homework essays and the lad was a fraud. After contacting the boy’s father this suspicion became downgraded. “Murray has been very preoccupied these last few weeks,” Mr Cheung had explained. “It is as if he bears some huge weight on his shoulders. But what it is exactly he has so far neglected to tell us.”

So it fell to me to find out what that burden was and Murray dutifully turned up at my claustrophically small counselling room one Friday afternoon at 3pm on the dot. “Thank you for being so punctual,” I began. “Can you tell me in your own words why you think Mr Lowther has referred you to me?”

“Oh, he was disappointed with my exam results, sir, that’s all,” he replied. I waited for more. “I suspect he thinks you may be able to help me do better next time,” he eventually added. “That’s about it, I suppose.” I waited again. “Do you have some shaman-like abilities to pull off a stunt like that?” he asked.

I did not experience that question as ironic, a puerile attempt at subordination, so I answered it directly. “My name is Barry Smith,” I said. “I have no special skills or magic cures. What I do have is the ability to listen to you patiently and treat what you say in total confidence. If we decide together that you might benefit from a referral to mental health professionals then I have the ability to instigate that.”

“By the words mental health professionals you mean psychiatrists, sir?” he asked.

“Possibly but more likely an experienced counsellor who exists independently of the educational system,” I answered.

“And who will judge me by different standards from my teachers you mean?”

“Exactly,” I nodded. “Whose objective values are not tarnished by the goalfish bowl culture of academic achievement and results determined careers.” This brought the wisp of a smile to his face and his body seemed to relax more into the low backed chair where it had been placed. We sat in silence for a while then. Not an uncomfortable one though. Murray appeared to be lost in his own thoughts. I saw no point in dissipating them.

“May I ask why you have that miniature of Picasso’s Guernica hanging on the wall in your tutorial room, sir?” he suddenly asked me.

“Oh, you’ve been in there, have you?” I replied and he silently assented. “The truth is the picture was rather foisted on me by Mrs Cuthbertson, the head of Liberal Studies. Her aesthetic motives seemed to be honourable and I did not have the heart to disappoint her. Why do you ask?”

“No particular reason,” he shrugged and lapsed back into an impenetrable, self-contained privacy.

“Clearly you have decisions to make,” I said, “and I don’t want to pressure you into making them now. So I propose you return at the same time, let me see, next Tuesday would work for me?” He concurred to this. “The options for you are to continue in the short term with me or to be referred immediately to an external counsellor or to opt out completely. It is entirely your call. Take this list of topics and questions with you to read. They may prompt you to make the best decision.”

On Monday Lowther asked me how I’d got on with Cheung, unable to contain a prurient smirk. I told him nothing except that we had successfully broken the ice. The following day when Murray arrived I detected a more business-like attitude in his manner. “I have an answer to one of your questions, sir.” he declared. “It came to me in a flash.”

“Exceellent,” I said. “And which question is that?”

‘If you could be someone else, who would it be?” he replied. I raised my eyebrows expectantly. “I’d be a dog,” he continued.

“And why is that?”

“Not just any dog, though,” he replied. “One with a kind owner. Like me.”

“You have a dog?” I asked and he nodded. “What breed is it?”

“Frankie’s mostly a French bulldog,” Murray explained. “He’s still a puppy. He’s got very short legs, a podgy body and what most people would call an ugly face.”

“What would you call it?” I asked.

I cannot recall now exactly how this conversation developed. What I can be sure of is that my random question set Murray’s tongue wagging in the same excited way that Murray’s petting no doubt set his dog’s tail. Murray’s thesis may be summarised as follows:

The phrase “It’s a dog’s life” was a total misnomer. A dog enjoyed the state of blissful unselfconsciousness that in the human world was only experienced by babies. It had a small range of feelings that proceeded from instinct and were not contaminated by rational thought. A dog like a baby did not suffer from doubts or moral uncertainties or romantic disappointments or existential anxieties. A dog had a basic set of needs that were either met or ignored. For a dog, therefore, contentment equated to one thing – their needs being met. Misery equated to their needs remaining unrequited. Not that a dog understood what contentment and misery meant. These were concepts that only arose within the context of mature adult consciousness. Human beings exist on a spectrum with abject misery at one end and euphoric happiness at the other and with all sorts of muddled stuff in between. Human babies have this bewildering scenario waiting for them as they grow but no dog in the world does. A dog never develops consciousness of its plight. Thus it has no plight. All it properly has is existence. Pure untrammeled being. And in this sense a dog is sacred.

“Surely then it follows that all animals must be sacred,” I commented, “with the single exception of homo sapiens?”

Murray appeared not to dissent from that view. “May I put a question to you now, sir?” he asked politely. Obviously I had no objection. The conversational progress had been unexpectedly prolific. “Do you not feel profoundly ashamed and mortified?” he continued.

Retrospectively sitting here now, I think that I instantly must have understood exactly what he was asking but for obscure reasons – maybe to do with teacher-pupil propriety or shock at the baldness of the premise on which the question was based, I’m not sure? – I pretended otherwise. “Ashamed and mortified about what exactly?” I replied obtusely.

“About the brutally destructive and insane ways human beings behave?” he answered. “The endless cycle of wars, the psychotic lack of trust between nations, the irreparable ideological divisions, the geopolitical balance of terror? Well, sir?”

“Let us say I recognise your characterisation of the human condition,” I considered, unsure where to steer this diversion. “But – “

He leaned his body towards me expectantly as I hesitated. “Yes?” he encouraged me. To be honest this gesture had an intimidating effect, as if our counselling roles had become reversed. My larynx seemed to freeze. “But you have become immune to it?” he continued. “You have come to feel that you have no responsibility in the matter? It is quite alright to say so, sir. My parents respond in the same way to those questions.”

“They do? You’ve asked them then?” I stammered like a fool.

“Oh yes,” he answered. “My dad confesses he felt a bit like me as a youth. He says that when you fall in love with someone and start having children of your own the texture of the world changes. You see things very differently. Is that true for you?”

I should have said, ‘No it wasn’t. I never felt bleak in the way you seem to do. I was too busy having fun. And when I wasn’t having fun I was thinking scientifically. I was marveling at the intricate, miraculous complexity of the universe and trying to fathom how all its material components functioned to create the whole’. But I didn’t say that. At least not then. My job was to listen to him. To earn his trust. That’s how I calculated anyway. “We are here to try to determine why according to Mr Lowther you underperformed so dramatically in your recent exams,” I reminded him. “At least that is my understanding?” He readily acquiesced to this and I felt that I had steadied the counselling ship as it veered towards choppy waters. “So do you share the opinion of your teachers and, if you do, can you offer any sort of explanation why it happened?”

“Oh yes indeed!” he chirped. “I had a heart of darkness moment. It was during a brief lull in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel. Russia took the opportunity that respite offered to redouble their bombing of Ukraine.” I must have looked puzzled because Murray instantly continued, “Have you read any Conrad, sir?” I shook my head. “I thought not. Too busy with your algorithms and physical properties of the universe, I suppose.”

I chose to take that last remark at face value rather than insubordination. “What exactly do you mean by a heart of darkness moment?” I asked directly.

“The horror, The horror, sir!” he snapped back. “Have you never had occasion to lift up an ornamental stone in your garden only to be shocked by the creepy crawlies congregating secretly in the slime underneath?” His eyes widened as he said this. He quivered and gulped for air. “That is probably an incorrect analogy,” he continued after a pause. “My epiphany of horror came about as the result of a week in week out surfeit of television news coverage of those hideous events in the Middle East and Ukraine.”

“You mean you became waterlogged by the horrific nature of these wars?” I interpreted.

“Waterlogged?” he repeated, savouring the word. “Very well put, sir. I became sort of asphyxiated and capsized simultaneously. You know, I went into my first exam that same day. It was a modern history paper. Question one was about the causes of the second world war. It said, ‘Discuss the cause of the war in relation to 1. The Treaty of Versailles 2. The rise of fascism 3. British policies of appeasement.’ I knew the answers the examiner wanted but I also knew they weren’t the right answers. They were skin deep answers. Superficial. They privileged political minutiae above basic hard core truth. I saw that with absolute clarity. History as we discuss it academically is absolute bunk!”

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“I think I tried to tell the truth, sir,” Murray replied. “Which is basically that shit happens. You can’t prevent it. Man’s inhumanity to man is inexhaustible. Is that a word, sir? Perhaps I meant indefatigable. Certainly I meant inevitable.” He shook his head as if trying to liberate it of some intolerable fuzziness. “After that I seemed to lose my mojo. One exam paper after another left me floundering. There were questions but simultaneously there were other questions, far deeper and more perplexing than the written ones. Am I making sense? This hidden agenda of questions rose up from the deep like monsters and badly distracted my attention from the task in hand. I didn’t know whether to identify them or ignore them so I sort of fell between the two stools. Does this happen to people who study science at an advanced level as well? I feel it must do.”

In the immediate term I dodged that bullet and asked him to give me other examples of these hidden monster questions that lurked in the depths of his exam questions. I won’t risk boring you with the ones he quickly supplied from history and politics papers – you may easily imagine them for yourselves. One from his Eng Lit paper intrigued me, however. The text under investigation was Shakespearian. ‘How far do you agree with King Lear that he is more sinned against than sinning?’

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Murray had written. “Lear is a power crazed narcissistic old git who treats his youngest daughter with shocking cruelty. The play is about her tragedy not his! It ought to have been called Princess Cordelia. Or maybe called Power Corrupts And Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. Why bring the theologically abstruse concept of sin into it? This play is an account of the way the honest and decent always get trodden underfoot by the power hungry and arrogant, isn’t it? Why academia deifies Shakespeare for just saying the bleeding obvious beats me!”

We had to leave our conversation at that because I had another appointment and I was gratified that Murray agreed readily to resume a few days later. The hiatus provided me with an opportunity to reflect. There is a vast literature in counselling services that relates to adolescents falling into temporary black holes of despair. Only an insignificantly small minority fail to emerge. I had no choice but to proceed as if Murray would be in the majority. As a child I had a slightly backward friend who walked into a vast museum and never got beyond the ground floor prehistoric animals sub-section. This chamber became the be all and end all of reality. It traumatised him for months. He turned out to be autistic and I wondered if this might be the case with Murray? He had developed tunnel vision. The museum had a dozen or more different perspectives of life to offer and he had neglected to visit them. However, after a private conflab with my colleague, Beryl, I opted for another strategy. She called it the de-catastrophising approach.

It went down like a lead balloon with Murray. “Let me get this right, sir,” he said. “You want me to meditate twice a day on all those millions of wretched hungry people who live in developing countries, often without clean water and sanitation?”

“That’s correct. It will reinforce how privileged you are to be living in such a politically secure, relatively affluent country,” I replied. “Your gloomy myopic perspective on the state of things will gradually dissipate. There’s lots of research evidence that shows this.”

“Oh right, so you want me to do a brainwashing job on myself?” he scoffed. “Hypnotise myself into believing something that isn’t factually true?”

“No, you’re missing the point,” I objected but he refused to buy it.

“I don’t think so, sir,” he insisted. “It would be much like a self-induced religious conversion. Christian illumination minus the wine and wafers.”

When I reported this back to Beryl she laughed. “He’s a very smart cookie,” she surmised. “There are several possibilities.” I was all ears. “He could be an attention seeker who is simply playing you and his teachers. He could suffer from Asperger’s on the other hand. Tell me, Barry, does he retain eye contact with you during counselling sessions?”

“Not all the time,” I considered. “He’s very intense. What exactly is Asperger’s anyway?”

She gave me the low down and a few links to reading material. So at our subsequent meeting I began by asking Murray to tell me about his friends. “What exactly do you want to know, sir?” he demanded suspiciously.

“I was wondering if you found it easy to socialise,” I admitted a bit too cackhandedly. “Or whether you prefer your own company, that’s all?”

“You think I’ve got Asperger’s syndrome!” he guffawed and slapped the palm of his hand against the table in disbelief. “You do, don’t you, sir? Come on, admit it. And please don’t evade my gaze in that way or I might start thinking you’ve got the same condition!”

“I wouldn’t be acting professionally if I didn’t try to eliminate every possibility,” I apologised lamely.

He batted this away with a gesture of the hand as if the slight meant nothing to him. “I am aware of the DSM, you know,” he said. “Why does the mental health industry keep sprouting new personality disorders and syndromes all the time? They proliferate like weeds in a garden border. Did you know homosexuality used to be included as one?” I shook my head. “It only finally got dug out in 1987. Maybe I should be counselling you, sir?”

Suddenly I found myself explaining how new and relatively untried I was in the game. He affably waved this away too. “Perhaps the mental health industry, as you call it, suffers from Chronic Oversimplification Syndrome?” I said.

“That’s one of the things I like about you, sir,” he grinned. “You’ve got a sense of humour. And you don’t take this cramming factory too seriously, do you?”

“Everybody has to earn a living,” I said. “Do you want to knock these sessions on the head then and go your own sweet way to academic oblivion?”

He lapsed into thought before responding. “Do you truthfully think there’s any way out of this quagmire for me or am I just scuppered?” He said this in a different tone of voice, a kind of vanquished matiness, as if we had finished a game of tennis and stepped outside the protocol of engagement.

“I think you’re a victim of the narrowness of our educational system, if I’m honest,” I said. “If you experienced life through the binoculars of the hard sciences I don’t think you would have become so despondent about the human condition. You can rely absolutely on the objective processes of scientific inquiry in the way you can’t on the human equivalents.”

“Can you really?” he queried. “You forget I was required to take Maths, Physics and Chemistry to GCSE level at my feeder school. I had more than a bellyful of scientific inquiry.”

“Well, maybe you were badly taught?” I ventured.

“Quite possibly,” he agreed. “I taught myself most of the time. I read well ahead of the syllabus.”

I checked on my computer for his results. Straight 9’s in all three subjects. How come I had missed that? In the Humanities subjects his grades hovered around the 7 level. “You were very good,”I said. He shrugged indifferently. “So how come you went down the Humanities route at advanced level?” I asked.

He took a deep breath. “I had this idea that subjective truth might be more illuminating than what you call objective truth,” he replied. “But with a few exceptions it’s not. It all merges into the same morass of uncertainty and abstraction and evasion. Take Physics for example.”

“What’s wrong with Physics?” I objected.

“Where to start?” he smiled ironically. Now it was my turn to shrug. “How about the so-called laws of the universe?” he suggested.

“Go on,” I encouraged him.

So he launched into a tirade about thermodynamics and Ludwig Boltzmann who he called the crown prince of oblivion, the evil genius who has infected us forever with his irrefutable ideas about entropy. “The universe is constantly, irrevocably falling into a state of disorder,” Murray said. “The waterwheel of energy only turns because water is flowing from a high point to a low point, to a point of disorder. Life absolutely depends on entropy. It is the ultimate paradox, the nightmare of physical reality. This planet will be sucked into the black hole formed when the sun burns itself out. Isn’t that undeniably true, sir?”

“Yes but you exaggerate the predicament,” I replied. “It will take millions of years for the universe to run down. In terms of our scientific infancy we are like a fortnight old baby. Hope springs scientifically eternal. There may be no problem to which it cannot eventually find a solution.”

“You mean we have time to figure a way out of the dilemma?” he challenged me a touch sarcastically. “Relocate to a parallel universe?”

“If one is found to exist, why not?” I said. “We mustn’t just give up on our creativity. Anyway, what I’m saying is that the astonishing ingenuity scientists have demonstrated in just the last two or three centuries indicate to me that there is a force for good alive in the world every bit as much as there is a force for chaos and disorder. After all, science has given us anti-biotics, heart transplants, central heating and – ”

“Indeed sir, but it has also given us nuclear weapons and brought us to the brink of ecological disaster,” he cut me off.

“Do those facts alone prevent you from enjoying yourself?” I objected. “From having fun like the rest of your peers?”

“Fun?” he repeated as if the word tasted sour on his tongue. “You mean like those rich people who danced on the deck of the Titanic when it was sinking?”

And so we conversed until I began to doubt my own arguments. Culturally and temperamentally we existed in different dimensions. I saw human life teleologically as a long gradual ascent from primitivism to knowledge and transcendence, while he experienced life – well, I don’t have words – as an asylum in which the inmates were either psychopaths or hedonists who did nothing but cultivate delusions of purpose and self-importance. Everything I said he turned round against me as if it was false logic. “Clearly life is a violation of the law of entropy but life is genetically programmed to seek ways to survive and express itself,” he repeated. “That is the ultimate paradox! How can anyone find consolation in that let alone sense?”

We decided to go our separate ways and a few days later I received a thank you letter and a bottle of whisky from him. Murray at least had a heart even if he didn’t know how to use it. When I told Lowther the fallout he shook his head. “A good summer holiday might bring him back to the fold,” he muttered. “The lad was so full of enthusiasm and positivity when he came here last September.”

That evening during dinner my six years old stepdaughter told us that she had learnt a new word at school today – evitable. “Are you sure?” replied Helena who is a librarian. “What did your headteacher say?”

“He said more rain is evitable tomorrow, so please bring a raincoat,” beamed Amy.

“No, you misheard,” Helena laughed. “He must have said more rain is inevitable. The forecast is awful.” Then she went on to explain the difference between the two words. “Inevitable means something must definitely happen. Such as for instance, your birthday inevitably falls on September 17th. Evitable at one time meant the opposite. For instance it is evitable that the temperature in Britain will never reach 25 degrees centigrade on Xmas day. But the word has fallen out of use. It is what we call a lost positive.”

“Just like Murray Cheung,” I couldn’t help thinking to myself.

It was during admin week in the Autumn term that the news came through of Murray’s death. He had jumped off a bridge as a train approached. Eventually we heard about the letter of apology he had left for his parents. My initial reaction was of disgust – you selfish little bastard! A few days later those feelings morphed into self-recrimination. How far had I contributed to this tragedy? Could I have done more to help him? In the staff room speculation circulated that Murray might have suffered from bipolar disorder and his parents should have taken the initiative to have the condition diagnosed. Neither Lowther nor Beryl accrued any blame whatsoever to me but that hardly mitigated my discomfort. I had failed to recognise a drowning man when I saw one. Instead of throwing him a life belt I had precipitated his descent to the lower depths by failing to demolish his delusional concept of an ocean dwelling monster called Entropy as he sank. It struck me that we, his teachers, had stoked up Murray’s curiosity to fever pitch but left it with only cosmetic answers and placebos to fall back on when the intellectual going got tough. How many more like him would come crawling out of the educational woodwork?

When I told the principal that I no longer wanted to counsel the students, the expression on his face of an irritation akin to contempt was not lost on me. Within a fortnight I also handed in my resignation. It had taken me just over eleven years to realise I wasn’t a teacher. A slow learner or what? I quickly found another job in the fire brigade on the front line. It suited me fine. It’s much more satisfying to put out blazing conflagrations than to pour petrol, however inadvertently, on imminently glowing embers.

One Saturday we were at a summer fete when I noticed that a man with a small dog on a lead kept squinting at me as if he wanted something. He possessed what people in these waspy provincial parts would call oriental features so I guessed he might be Cheung senior. “Are you Murray Cheung’s father by any chance?” I took the initiative. He shook my hand warmly as if we were old friends. “And this must be his French bulldog, Freddie?”

“Frankie,” Mr Cheung corrected me and the beast gazed mischievously upwards into my eyes then pawed playfully on the turf. “Murray spoke a lot about you,” he continued. “He thought you a very courteous and honourable man.” And a few sentences of small talk later I picked him up on that word honourable. “He felt you had a – how can I say? – generous nature. You endured the slings and arrows of the blackboard jungle stoically. I’ve heard you are a fire fighter now?”

I nodded my head, suddenly lost for words. Other peoples’ grief has always unnerved me. Behind the camouflage of affability I sensed a rawness akin to derangement and suddenly regretted my impetuosity in making the approach. “I dream about Murray very often, you know,” Mr Cheung confided. “It is a great comfort. He talks, he laughs. Sometimes he even makes predictions. Just the other night he advised me there would soon be a terrible fire at his old college and you would play a large part in putting it out.” Ultimately I wished the bereaved man well and wandered back to my family who stood waiting with gathering impatience out of earshot nearby.

In the event only half that bizarre prediction came true. My old college went up in flames one night several weeks later. A suspected arson attack. As for my heroics, they were non-existent because we were in Majorca on our annual family holiday. Initially I suspected old Cheung had done the job himself – as retribution for overloading his son’s brain with poison – but then one of my senior colleagues who had trundled around the pedagogic block a good few times eventually put me right. “One hundred percent the culprit was a disgruntled student,” he announced. “Always is, always will be.”