I had an odd encounter when I was in Spain briefly, to see my sister D, earlier this year.
I discovered that, staying in the same hotel, was my old French teacher, a man we always, with stunning originality, called Froggy.
I made myself known to him and he (incredibly) recognised me from the thin blond skinny spotty thing I was fifty years ago.
During the course of our conversation I discovered that a teacher with whom I had a particular antipathy had been punished after my departure.
A barking dog in the street was disturbing one of his classes so he sent first one and then another of his pupils out to silence it. Both were unsuccessful so, exasperated he decided to do the job himself. Sutane flying and in a cloud of chalk dust he descended on the animal and was then bitten twice for his pains and had to be rushed to the nearest hospital for stitches.

Such was this man’s ability to inflict pain with “The Leather” that the school went into universal rejoicing.

But that of course is not at all the point of this piece.
I have a clear memory of my very first class with the same Froggy, he started to teach us the colours in French. Rouge, he explained, gave us the word for the red pigment then universally applied by our mothers to their pale cheeks, French yellow, jaune, gave us a very common disease of the time Jaundice, which turned us yellow.
The following day he arrived in to examine us on our colours and we dutifully stuck up our hands to answer the questions.
I can clearly remember one fellow in the class, I can even remember his name, it was Pat Mc Carthy and he was so small his mother had kept him in short pants as she must have thought he was not tall enough yet for “Longers”.
Anyway this Pat, when asked the French word for “Green” arrived at a perfectly appropriate answer (given the French inclination to name their diseases after colours) : It was he said ;”Gangrene”.