A work acquaintance told tale t’other day of a colleague who’s just relocated from London to the States, together with wife and teenage daughter.

It would be a few weeks into her first term at her new school that the call would come from the principal’s office, asking him to pick up his daugher immediately for some grave offence. “I’d usually paddle students for this, but since you signed the form refusing permission for me to use corporal punishment, I have no choice but to suspend her,” he’d explain.

“What form?”

“It was one of the sheaf of papers you returned to us before your daughter started.”

And so the saga would unfold: the daughter who’d offered to read all the paperwork and so helpfully to fill it in, so all her father had to do was sign. Her failure in so doing to mention the disciplinary form, knowing that her father would doubtless condone a sound paddling were she to misbehave.

The journey to the school to pick up both the girl and a fresh punishment form. A stern lecture that evening, before his belt was taken off and folded double. Tears and cuddles afterwards. And a trip to the principal’s office the following morning to deliver her fresh form, then bend over his desk to be paddled hard across her jeans.