DO YOU have problems with prepositions? If the answer is yes, let me put your mind at rest.

So do I.

Although I vaguely remember being told about them in English lessons at school, I wouldn’t recognise a preposition if it moved in next door.

So here’s the great news, especially if you are an 11-year-old kid, fretting about being asked about such things in your SATS tests: It doesn’t matter.

Neither does most of the stuff they are drumming into young children about grammar.

I have been earning a living from writing and editing for 27 years now, and I have been writing this column for the last 11 of those years, yet not once have I ever needed to know - and neither have I cared - whether any of the words in any of the sentences I have written or edited are prepositions, subjunctives or past participles.

English is an art, not a science, and if you want to destroy a child’s creative interest in language, the quickest way is to start dissecting it like a pathologist dissects a corpse.

If it wasn’t yet dead, it soon will be.

Not only is this the sort of rubbish young children are taught in schools these days, but they must also be subjected to the unnecessary pressure of being tested on it, which is cruel.

Here’s one of the questions on the SATS paper for 11-year-olds: ‘Is “but” in the following sentence a subordinating conjunction or a co-ordinating conjunction?

Jamie likes roller-skating, but he has never tried ice-skating.’ The correct answer is: Who cares?

It’s no wonder some parents are withdrawing their children from school for one-day ‘strikes’ in protest at the way subjects are taught and tested.

The irony in all this is the controversy blew up at the same time the rest of the world was marking the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare.

The Bard is a unique case. If the world had to vote for its greatest artist, musician, sportsman or the leader in any other field, we could debate it for days, and we still wouldn’t agree on the answer, but when it comes to writers, our boy is way out in front.

He is the undisputed champion of the written and spoken word and, four whole centuries after he shuffled off this mortal coil, is still revered throughout the world, even by people who don’t speak English.

And if I am sure about one thing, it’s that Shakespeare never stopped for a moment to worry about which parts of his verses were prepositions and which were subordinating whatsits, and he never lost sleep over pointless tests.

He just got his pen out and got on with it.

And anybody who has ever put pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard owes him a huge debt.

Whatever you fancy doing when you write is OK, ever since Shakespeare burned the rule book.

Start sentences with prepositions if you like, and if you want to split your infinitives, then boldly go and do it. Shakespeare already did.

And if it was good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for the rest of us.

So if you are from the Department For Education, stick that up your preposition and smoke it.