He was, for a considerable time, a Young Conservative, a violinist and the possessor of several Top Of the Pops albums. Children of the seventies might recall these vinyl discs: they cost about a quarter of the price of a “real” record because the songs, though current, were not by the original artists.

When we shared a flat at university, Andy decided he would like to be Welsh. He had a stack of Max Boyce records he would play for me, talking along with the dumpy, giggling, Celtic clown in an assumed accent that was Welsh via Islamabad. It was all a bit much. To de-stress, I used to hide in my room, stick a cushion up my jumper and sing “A wee Welsh **** with a high, high voice Who’s always laughing at his own jokes” in a tune vaguely like that of Sospan Bach.

I think I am about to go against the flow myself with respect to Higher Still unit assessments. People whose opinions I respect have been writing to this paper for years to express grave misgivings about new courses in certain subjects. While it hasn’t all been plain sailing, physics simply hasn’t had these problems. The Higher course has been sensibly divvied up into three units and we have been well supported with materials from the development unit.

I work in a lovely, smallish, rural school but it has two disadvantages, both of which are addressed by the present system. One is proportionately small numbers at S5-S6. Under the old system, I had no possibility of separate Higher, Series 1 and Series 2 module classes. My option was to either combine Series 1 and 2 (different courses) or Higher and Series 2 (different assessment systems). Neither worked as well as the new scheme where my “module” kids are either in Int 2 or spending their first Higher year gaining unit passes.

Disadvantage two is that I meet a fair number of braw, roon’ faced laddies who come from tiny villages and love coming to school to do anything but work. A great deal has been done to address this problem and the kick up the arse administered by a compulsory unit test complements all the other strategies nicely.

Though never a conservative - young, old, small or large C - I don’t want change this time. I’m probably in the minority, but that has never bothered me. Did I tell you, by the way, about the time Andy and I went train-spotting?

Gregor Steele is worried that he’ll be thrown out of the lodge for praising a development unit.