Faulty valve didn't just leave me drained, but the whole site

I had a nightmare the other day.... My mum has a caravan in the Lake District, which her and my father bought about 30 years ago when he took early retirement.

- Steve Canavan

He worked as a primary school teacher all his life - well, aside from a brief spell in a tailor's which came to an abrupt end when he was fired for dressing the display mannequins in trousers with one leg rolled up and telling customers it was the latest design from France.

But teaching changed rather a lot during his career. When he first started in the late 60s for instance, he used to take kids on school trips to a giant sprawling countryside park called Shibden Hall near Halifax where there were lakes, dodgy-looking strangers wandering about and generally lots of potential dangers for a group of 30 young children. Yet on arrival, he would say 'right, off you go - meet back here in five hours' and then he'd head to the pub and have three or four pints and do a crossword until it was time to leave.

Miraculously, nothing disastrous happened during these outings but, not surprisingly, as the years passed and they introduced pesky things like health and safety, my dad was no longer able to do that.

Worse still, they bought in Ofsted and staff meetings and proper curriculums - none of which my dad was a fan of (his favourite lesson - which he usually did after he'd been out late the night before - was to write a long word on the board such as PRICETWONOWREADY and say, 'ok, see how many different words you can get out of that', then he'd head to the staff room for a strong coffee and a snooze).