Enduring a sweaty airport check-in queue on the way home from a holiday in Majorca, Gerald Haigh, TES contributor and former head of Henry Bellairs junior school in Warwickshire, realised he had written the wrong flight numbers on his baggage labels. “I made a botched attempt at correcting them, ending up with labels that looked as if they’d been chewed by wild animals,” Mr Haigh recounts. “A woman behind me, with whom I had exchanged a few pleasantries, impassively watched my inept performance and then said, ‘Are you a headteacher by any chance?’” Turned out she was a school bursar, well accustomed to senior management incompetence in small practical matters.
