Yesterday afternoon I had the dubious pleasure of returning home by bus at about the time local schools send their pupils home. In the absence of organised transportation for schoolkids in England, at about 4pm every day the local bus effectively turns into a school bus.

I can’t fault the kids’ behaviour, really: they were on the whole a pleasant bunch, it’s just there were so many of them, in their variously coloured school ties, with huge folders pressed to their chests, chatting over the heads of other bus passengers. It was a little cramped.

To distract myself, I imagined I was on a different school bus entirely: as a middle-school girl on an organised field trip to a museum, for example. My best friend had a cold and was forced to stay behind, and nobody wants to sit with me or talk with me, and all the snooty six-formers are behaving as though the whole thing is beneath them… I just know that in a few minutes this cauldron will boil over, at which point the supervising prefect will snap: “That’s it! I’m reporting the lot of you to Dr. Jenkins the moment we’re back!” And we will all get caned – even though I’m doing nothing wrong, I’m telling you, nothing!..

Lost as I was in this fantasy, I didn’t fail to notice one of the girls take her tie off her neck and wrap it around her forehead instead, hippy headband-style. In my school, on my bus, one of my fantasy schoolgirls would know better.