I HAVE just written to 10 Downing Street, demanding compensation for my terrible education. Frankly, I want my money back.

It seemed OK at the time, but now I have had a few years to reflect on it, it was awful.

For a start, lately I have been racking my brains to think of a single instance when I have been able to benefit in any way from all those hours my maths teachers spent teaching me algebra.

Geometry: yes, algebra: no.

Then, as if to underline how my precious school days were mostly wasted, I also stumbled on a YouTube video of somebody making a beautiful chopping board out of different-coloured woods, which really was quite inspiring.

And I couldn’t help thinking how much different my life would have been if we hadn’t spent our woodwork lessons making a stupid spatula.

Or the tie rack we made in metalwork.

Ironically, that tie rack was the only useful thing I ever made at school, but only because, for years, our mum used it as a handle for the back gate.

Also on the internet recently, I was invited to join a campaign calling for all schoolkids to be taught how to grow their own food.

I found this puzzling because - unless I am very much mistaken - most supermarkets sell food these days, and now the Second World War is over there is no need for us all to rush down to the allotment if we have better things to do with our time.

Strangely enough, in our school we were taught how to grow things, in something called rural studies, and while I’m sure it inspired some kids to have green fingers, all it did for me was amplify my aversion to worms.

You might think of your own school days as the best days of your life, but not me.

Although there was far less emphasis on teaching kids to pass pointless exams, which politicians now think education is all about, there was also a seemingly insatiable desire to teach us things that had little or no value in the outside world.

I am still fuming about the way we were taught geography.

As I understand it from older generations, this subject was once a journey of discovery, which inspired kids by showing them the richness and diversity of other countries, even if it was based on the fact that a lot of those countries were still part of the British Empire.

The only thing I can remember from my geography lessons was learning about the best place to build a steel works, which I am beginning to think is never going to have any practical use in my own life.

It was left to a random Friday afternoon free period in junior school to whet my appetite for the world beyond Upper Stratton.

For some reason the time was spent going through a nice book of stamps, which set some kids off on an ultimately frustrating stamp collecting frenzy.

But it filled me with wonder about the exotically named places on the stamps, and a lifelong desire to, for instance, find out more about places weird enough to have triangular stamps.

This and two other things prevented my school days being a total washout.

The first was being inspired by certain history teachers, which has shaped my life ever since, and the second was being at junior school during the first moon landings, when our teacher set us off on an unforgettable project about space travel that he knew would make us starry-eyed.

Compared with the algebra and the woodwork and the geography, it was out of this world.