Enduring a sweaty airport check-in on the way home from a holiday in Majorca, Gerald Haigh, contributor to these pages and a former headteacher, 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,” Haigh reports.
“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?’” It turned out that she was a school bursar, well accustomed to senior management incompetence in small practical matters.
