I was caned at school on average once a term, for myriad stupidities. Once for having written every obscenity I could think of on my maths book and then, somewhat witlessly, handing it in to be marked. Once for urinating in the domestic-science scales. Once for organising and selling tickets for a fairly vicious fight between two friends. On one remarkable occasion, simply for walking down the wrong side of a corridor.

Whenever the headmaster said, “Bend over, Liddle”, I wished and wished that I had the courage to say, “But sir, we’ve only just met — shouldn’t you take me out for dinner first, at least . . . ?” I never did, of course.

Worse than the cane was my mum and dad finding out I’d been caned, which would mean another catalogue of punishment. One tried, therefore, to conceal the fact from them. But I was caught emerging from the bathroom once with the two tell-tale parallel bruises across my buttocks.

I explained to my mother that I had somehow “fallen onto a wall . . . twice” but she knew, and the pocket money was stopped and various other strictures imposed. My parents never asked what it was I’d actually done: the school’s judgment — right or wrong — was good enough for them. And I think all the other parents were the same.

I don’t think we should go back to those days. I went to a perfectly decent comprehensive school in northern England and have nothing but affectionate memories of it; the casual brutality meted out by teachers was very much of its time and maybe place, even if I had no objections then. But something, surely, has to be done to redress the balance in our classrooms now. The teachers find everybody against them — the pupils, obviously; but then the police and the social services departments and even their own education authorities. And, worst of all, the parents.

Take the case of 15-year-old Daniel Walton, from Macclesfield, sent home from school because he refused to stand up out of respect when the headmaster, Kevin Harrison, entered the classroom (and also threw a bit of obnoxious abuse when ordered out of the class).

What was Daniel’s dad’s response to this? To stand by his son; to say he’d done the right thing. Tim Walton, who is unemployed, said he had told his son that people needed to “earn respect” before it was shown. He was photographed, looking defiant and pig ignorant, in some of the morning newspapers. What a self-regarding oaf.

The headmaster commands respect because he is the headmaster, and that’s an end to it — the sooner Daniel Walton realises that, the less likely he is to end up like his thick father.

Worse still is the case of Mark Ellwood, a teaching assistant from Hull, who physically removed a foul-mouthed and disruptive child from a classroom, being threatened all the while that he would be “stabbed” and “killed”.

The repulsive child was not injured at all during the eviction process. Ellwood’s reward was to be banged up in the police cells for 22 hours when the boy’s useless mother complained. Then he was suspended from his job and forced by the local social services department to move out of his home and have no contact whatsoever with his three children while the court case was pending. Yes, of course — a court case: they brought a court case against him.

Nine months later, Ellwood has been cleared; but what an indictment of the education department (which refused to stand by Ellwood), the police and the social services.

Ellwood said, on the court steps, that there was a “climate of fear” in our classrooms, that teachers felt unable to act, that threats of stabbing and murder were daily events.

We know that most social services departments are staffed by politically correct incompetents. We may not have much greater regard for the modern police or education authorities.

But the real problem, at the back of it all, is the parents.

Brown's biscuit dilemma

Come on — there was no answer that Brown could have reasonably given. He’d have been in trouble no matter what he said.

If he’d admitted that his favourite biscuits were rich tea or digestives, he would have confirmed the impression of being deadly boring. If he’d said any one of those semi-sweets — Marie, Morning Coffee etc — we would have suspected it as being a consequence of a grim Presbyterian upbringing and also wondered if he had digestive problems as well as being half-blind and on drugs. Maryland cookies and he’d be in the pocket of Washington; fig rolls are eaten exclusively by homosexuals; chocolate digestives or HobNobs would have had the obesity lobby smacking him around. Garibaldi are proto-fascist; Nice would reveal him as an auld alliance Francophile. Choco-Leibniz? Pretentious, affected and foreign. Shortbread in a tartan tin? Cartoon Scottish. Gypsy creams and he’d have the travelling community calling for his prosecution. Bourbons? Counter-revolutionary (plus they’re foul biscuits; only Harman would eat bourbons. Probably secretly, in her bedroom, by the packet). Wagon Wheels? You great big kid, Brown, grow up. Lemon puffs? You take my point.

Raptors 1, rodents 0

Red kites — the backlash starts. They come over here and eat our poor bloody endangered species. The kites were the subject of the RSPB’s most successful reintroduction programme yet — and there are now more red kites in the Chilterns than there are, for example, working-class people or black people or Asians. But in Aberdeenshire, where they’ve also been reintroduced, they’ve started liquidating the local red squirrel population — a creature even more endangered, and with nice tufty ears. Back down south they also annoy the indigenous kestrels by taking their food and jumping to the front of tree waiting lists. Kites out! Difficult business, conservation.

Life in the old dogma yet . . .

So far, the Pope’s version of Operation Sealion has had no more success than the original. Last week Benedict XVI — a German chap called Joseph Ratzinger — announced his plan to steal all Britain’s Anglicans and put them in a giant United Catholic Church of All the Sainted Bigots, thus destroying the C of E overnight. In Lambeth Palace I dare say they were muttering darkly that you can take the boy out of the Hitler Youth . . . etc. Ratzinger had hoped to appeal to Anglicans opposed to their church’s views about gays and women priests, but had not realised that people who can be bigoted about that sort of thing might also be bigoted in other areas, too. Branches of the Anglican Communion — the Kenyans, the Canadians, the Ugandans — told him to get stuffed; we’ll stick with the poofs and the Vicar of Dibley, they argued, rather than give our allegiance to the Whore of Rome (no offence, mate).

Otherworldly explanation

An off-duty police sergeant recently spotted two alien beings standing in a crop circle near Silbury Hill in Wiltshire. The copper, who has not been named, said they were blonde-haired creatures dressed in white spacecrafty-type costumes and ran away faster than any human could run when they saw him. Then the field started making a weird crackling noise and he came over all funny and felt “uneasy”.

He added — as if it were necessary — “I had a pounding headache for the rest of the day.” So that’s what it is: aliens! Thank God. I have similar experiences every day, especially in the late evening, and, at last, now there is an explanation.

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