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Hopper insists he has not consciously tried to shy away from dealing with his experiences on the day of the atrocity. “If I do think back to primary school, generally I think a lot more about the positive aspects of being there and the things I enjoyed — the plays we put on in the assembly hall, like a version of Oliver Twist, and the fetes and Christmas services.”

Hopper takes pride in being grounded, self-contained and in control of himself. Funerals, he says, leave him dry-eyed, and at sporting victories he does not let himself get carried away with the euphoria. Has he ever wondered if this is a result of what happened a decade ago? “Maybe it is,” he concedes. “Or maybe I would have been like that anyway. I’ve never thought it had a serious effect on me. But maybe it drove my emotions deeper down into me. I always had the feeling I’d been through this big thing and come out of it okay. And I thought: ‘If I can get through that I can get through anything.’ I think of myself as emotionally strong. Emotion is something I very rarely show.”

Does he regard emotion as something to guard against? “In a lot of cases, yes.” Then he makes a curious connection. “It’s the same with terrorism. What the terrorists are trying to do is manipulate your emotions. They are trying to provoke an emotion from people.

“You’ve got to try to avoid that. Otherwise they have succeeded. If you don’t let it get to you, and don’t fall for the bait, they have failed.”

Perhaps Hopper feels that way about Hamilton. Would a show of emotion mean the ghastly criminal had won in some way? Yes, he says. “What he was trying to do was affect us seriously, so the best thing we can do is not let it get to us. Otherwise the person who did this is winning.”

It is a philosophy that Hopper believes had served him well in the past 10 years. Recently, however, a crack may have appeared in the barrier that he has erected to ensure that Hamilton cannot reach him.

Last year as part of a course he was doing, he found himself at another Dunblane school teaching basic numeracy to a class of primary ones. “It was great fun,” he says with a grin, a sparkle coming to his eyes. “I loved working with them. Kids that age are so charismatic. They love what they are doing, just being at school and having fun. They are so easily motivated. Watching them learn through playing, I really enjoyed being with them.”

What struck home, perhaps for the first time in almost 10 years, was the impact — the emotional impact — of what he had lived through.

“To think that the kids who were killed never got the chance to do anything with that energy and that promise, and never got the fun later on in primary school that I did — that’s hard,” he says. “That makes me emotional.”

Hopper had been considering a career in industry or academia. He has changed his mind. Now he thinks he will do a postgraduate course to become a primary school teacher. At last, he may have found the life he has been looking for.

Steven Hopper is one of the interviewees in Dunblane: A Decade On, a documentary broadcast on Wednesday, March 8, 8pm on Five.

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