Bulgaria’s school year started this week, with a new generation of first-graders, routine enough news except for me and a few thousand other parents; one of those first-graders took my surname through the school gates with her.

Not that Bulgarian children go through those gates unaccompanied. There we were, cameras in hand, thronging to watch the cheerful homespun spectacle of the veterans, slightly older children showing off their singing and speaking skills in welcome. For all the ritual, there was a kind of happy, floral-bedecked anarchy about it; how unlike my own reception in 1967, a long time ago in a universe (thankfully) far, far away, which rather than happy anarchy, offered a somewhat grimmer pomposity.

Were Hogwarts not fiction, I would happily attend a summer school for adults there, if only for the possibility of time travel and, by one swoop of a wand, to consign to non-existence the three schools that I attended in succession, until December 1979 brought liberation. But Hogwarts is fiction, and that which is past is a reality, all Latin, the cane, detention and cult worship of rugby – it is no accident that the school in Tom Brown’s Schooldays is named Rugby. (Pedants may now point out that actually it was so called because the novel was set at a real school.)

Watching today’s proceedings, I remembered how we were systematically lied to at the start of each year. The first lie was that school years were the best of your life (they were anything but, and for that matter, I am currently living my best years) and the second lie was that how you perform at school determines how the rest of your life turns out (this could be true only if while at school, you murder someone and are sentenced to life imprisonment). Oh, how we loved the closing scene of If… but the reality of Columbine, many years later, made that fantasy more than unpalatable.

The past is another country, and while I may seem at a disadvantage because I went to school in a very un-Bulgarian country and so have scant experience of relevance today, for many Bulgarians too, the schools into whose care their children are assigned are not quite those of the "socialist" era long passed. Bulgarian parents must find their way anew as their children must, perhaps facing greater challenges than just that new one worldwide, the question of at which age it would be best to buy a home computer for the budding pupil.

Teachers now are effectively much weaker figures than they were, (thankfully) unlike mine, with no resort to the cane.

Then there is Flashman, the eternal bully, incarnated again and again. Like Brown, I defeated him in the early days. How? That’s my secret, but that I’ll teach our daughter.