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Another said that when he had underlined some spelling errors in a student’s essay the student replied: “What are you? Some sort of spelling fascist?” If you want to play football for Arsenal you need to be able to kick a ball. If you want to aspire to any sort of academic achievement you need to be able to express yourself clearly. This has nothing to do with class wars and the oppression of the workers by their well-spoken superiors. It has nothing to do with who controls the language and why. We all do. Or, at least, we all should.

Most alarming is that many teachers themselves seem not to have learnt the basics of the language they will end up teaching. One woman wrote to tell me: “When I left teacher training college in 1983, despite my academic qualifications, I had no idea what the difference between a noun and a verb was. I still struggle with the split infinitive, word order and the other essential parts of grammar in the language I love and speak.”

But perhaps we’re getting to the stage where it’s not thought important for either teachers or pupils to know about this sort of thing. This summer a GCSE examiner wrote to The Times that he had been “forced to award ludicrously high marks to candidates whose command of English grammar and/or sentence structure was simply non-existent. Upwards of 150 candidates will have been awarded a C (or better) who wrote ‘could of’, ‘might of’, ‘ should of’”.

Far from liberating or helping the young, this sort of nonsense is more likely to harm them. As a former teacher put it: “It is easy to choose to dumb down when you are suitably equipped with all the skills and tools you need to navigate your way around the language. What tends to be forgotten is that those who are ‘dumbed down’ to, have no choice but to take the educational menu that is offered them. Those encouraged to take this inferior educational diet will never hope to achieve the literacy skills that their ‘dumbing down’ masters already possess.”

Now read this: “I’m sure you could of written it alot neater.”

Three howlers in one sentence. I would like to tell you I invented it to make a point, or that it was written by a drunken Latvian whose English lessons finished 30 years ago. Neither, I’m afraid. It was written at the bottom of an eight-year-old’s essay by her primary-school teacher. God help the eight-year-old. God help every child in her class.

I left school at 15 with a clutch of O-levels and something much more important: a basic understanding of how to put a sentence together. In those days it was enough to help me get a job on a small newspaper and make a decent living over the years since. Grammar has been good to me.

It worries me that children do not get the same help that I had more than half a century ago. I wish the basic rules of grammar were still taught to every child. They do matter — even though we may consciously break them from time to time.

Many of the rules are broken in my book, some inadvertently but most in full knowledge of the offence that may be caused. I do not think you will find any split infinitives. There is no particular reason for that except that I happen to find them ugly. You will find many sentences beginning with conjunctions and many ending with a preposition.

I won’t go as far as the gauche young man from rural Mississippi who won a scholarship to Harvard. On his first day he approached a couple of cocky young New England socialites. “Hey y’all . . . where’s the library at?” They sniggered and one replied haughtily: “At Harvard we prefer not to end a sentence with a preposition.” The young redneck thought a moment and said: “Okay. Where’s the library at, asshole?” But I will use the word “only” correctly.

Dinosaurs play a large part in the life of my youngest child. We were talking about how many of his vast collection he should take to nursery one morning. “I’m going to take only one,” he announced firmly. And then he repeated it: “Only one.” He was probably a bit surprised by my reaction.

I swept him up into my arms, hugged and kissed him and wanted to rush out into the street shouting, “My little boy put ‘only’ in the right place and he’s not even four years old yet!” I didn’t, but I did tell people about it in the office the next morning. Big mistake. I could see it in their eyes. Poor little soul, they were thinking, what chance does he have of growing up into a normal human being with a father like that? Because it dominates your own life you assume colleagues and friends will show at least a passing interest in the book you are writing. Instead they grow visibly uneasy. They murmur “How very interesting” as you begin yet another rant about kids today not being able to write a simple sentence to save their lives. You know what they’re thinking: “Another bloody anorak! God save us from them.” This is hurtful — but possibly true. Better to be an anorak, though, than some other things.