Like many people, I am disappointed and deeply concerned at the lack of progress being made on tackling the climate emergency at every level.
Sitting at traffic lights last weekend on a visit to my mum, I saw a very distinguished elderly gentleman gingerly crossing the road. I was rather admiring his attire, totally out of place in the Lancastrian mill town of my birth.
He was wearing a beige linen artist’s smock with laces, chocolate brown trousers with matching block-heeled shoes and a panama hat, that was so definitely from Ecuador, where the very finest hats are made.
He was walking, not with a stick, but, inevitably, with a cane.
Just as I drove off, but too late to stop or circle back, I realised that this gent was Mr Darling, my one time German and history teacher.
This was the man who first introduced me to some extraordinarily vivid German insults, which are lodged in my mind 35 years later and I still occasionally quote, much to the amusement of my European colleagues.
He was a mimic, a raconteur, who brought the Franco-Prussian war vividly to life and rendered the Romanovs unforgettable by way of a distasteful but very amusing quip delivered in a comedy cockney accent.
He was also an excellent teacher.
When I sent out a WhatsApp message about my sighting to some of my school friends, it was striking how everyone seemed to have their own memory of him.
Somebody talked about the time he was deported from Russia after a false accusation of him being a spy, another one talked about how in the 1960s he had been a prospective parliamentary candidate for Crewe, who by his own admission ‘was very good with the middle-aged ladies at tea parties, but not so impressive with a megaphone outside the railway works’.
My recollection was of hearing of the extraordinarily exotic trips he made during the school summer holidays.
I had never heard of ‘bucket shops’, where he bought his airline tickets, never mind of the South East Asian gambling hot spot of Macau, where he spent a month in the mid 1980s.
At the time, hearing of somebody actually going on holiday to Brazil was almost like hearing about someone going to the moon.
Almost everyone marvelled at his bold dress sense. I distinctly recall the neckerchief, open necked shirt, and brown velvet jacket.
Others recall the pink shirt, and bow tie, in an era when the only people who wore bow ties were bouncers, snooker players and Bernard Manning.
And none of them were renowned for wearing them with pink shirts.
He was also the only teacher at school who wore cologne.
Reflecting on this brief visual encounter it really struck me what a massive influence a good teacher has on people’s lives.
One of my friends has now lived in Germany for more than 30 years and has a German passport.
Without that teacher making German seem accessible, fun, almost dare I say it, a little raffish, then his life would have taken a very different turn. He told me that he felt that Mr Darling was probably the most influential person he had ever met.
I had never really thought about why my ‘go-to’ shirt colour is pink, why velvet is my jacket of choice for a special occasion, and a few days of beer and sausage in Germany is my idea of an indulgent weekend away, but I am wondering whether sub-consciously his influence is greater than I had appreciated.
What a privilege it is to have been taught by such a gifted and memorable teacher.
