GILLARBUTHNOTT

I was born and brought up in Edinburgh, where I went to James Gillespie's High School, famous as the school where the author Muriel Spark was educated, and on which she based her most famous book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie... Almost all the teachers when I was there seemed to be wildly eccentric spinsters, including one maths teacher who would climb onto a chair and disappear into a cupboard at one end of the room, and reappear out from a cupboard door at the other end, having crawled her way through. Then there was Miss Dalgliesh. She was my teacher in Primary 5. She always wore a black teaching gown, and used to swoop round the room like a large, friendly rook. She had a stuffed tawny owl in her room, and if you were particularly good, you might be allowed to take it home for the weekend. She used to invite some of us (we were all girls in Gillespie's back then) to the flat she shared with her sister, to eat cream cakes and listen to her sister play the piano… I don't think they..