Mrs Mills started at school in the summer of 1961 - and she was unlike anyone I had ever met before. Facially she was different and she had bronze, olive skin. She was going to teach us English, French and music. I found out she came from a place called Switzerland, although at 8 years of age I had no idea what that meant. Curiously, sometimes she also went by the name Madame Du Pont - all very strange.

She was one of the best teachers I ever had, if not the best. And she gave me an enduring love of two things: the French language (and by extension all languages), and the Mediterranean. Curiously, she also taught us English - a native French speaker teaching English to English boys in and English school.

We also learned Latin at that school, although we never understood why we had to learn a dead language - how stupid of the school. Only years later did I come to realise that it was one of the most useful subjects I ever learned, and I still use it today. It explained where our culture came from, it taught us grammar, and it was the key to understanding many English words.

I have also dabbled in German, Spanish, Italian and Welsh. Now there's a weird language for us anglophones. Following bizarre rules, words mutate at the beginning not the end as you would expect. How am I supposed to find anything in the dictionary? And there are at least a dozen ways of making a word plural.