After leaving school I followed the prescribed path and had a good time for four years at Edinburgh University. Much to my surprise I gained a B.Sc. in Maths and Statistics. Actually, I had to work very hard after realising that being 'good' at school didn't qualify me to reach the upper echelons of Maths students. At an early stage I found my level and managed to get the balance right
between study and and social life.
So what to do next? My French teacher at school, Mrs Ferguson, one day pointed at me and said, "you're going to be a teacher." Yes, it happened. I went to Dundee Teacher's College and enjoyed the year there.
I had been a student for 5 years so it was time to find a job. At that time, 1980, you could very easily find a job teaching maths but I suddenly had cold feet and felt the need to escape from education. During the long university holidays I had travelled to the USA, Turkey and Singapore and I had a desire to work abroad rather than just go on holiday.
A schoolfriend and I set off for France to pick grapes and our first stop was Paris. The story nearly ended there when I was hit by a car as we crossed a busy road. I was thrown on to the windscreen and over the back of the car so am really lucky to be alive. My scalp was sewn up and with no other obvious injuries I was allowed out. I had small pieces of windscreen appearing out of my scalp for months afterwards! A rather funny result of this was that I got a letter from the car driver's insurance company trying to get me to pay for damage to the windscreen! I nearly died, for goodness sake!
Next day we headed south to the grapes which were not ready and ended up picking Golden Delicious apples. Great fun but after carrying many tons from tree to box, camping in the woods and sampling the local plonk we decide to head back to Scotland.
Back to reality, an interview and a job at
Dalkeith High School which had 1500 pupils. I can only describe this as terrifying for the first few months but by the end of the session I had actually begun to enjoy it and felt I had served at least a bit of my time.