Latin luck

I think that you could probably have quite a long conversation about what constitutes luck, especially if you were, say, with a group of friends sat outside a pub having a few drinks on a sunny evening. That sounds lovely. I'm not, though, I'm sat on a train heading towards London, having a conversation with myself about luck.

Some of what gets described as luck is just pure chance, like being dealt a good hand at cards. Sometimes luck is just beating the odds, like winning the lottery, but quite often when people say someone is lucky, it glosses over the fact that that person went some way to creating that luck. So, the singer-songwriter who gets spotted playing in a bar by a record company scout may be considered lucky but that rather overlooks the hours they spent learning to play their instruments and writing songs and, indeed, getting themselves gigs.

My children aside, I think I've had two major pieces of luck, what I'd consider 'proper' luck, in my life. One of those relates to getting my first job and the other concerns my Latin 'O' level. I quite enjoyed Latin at school. I think if you like language and writing but also a bit of science, it's going to appeal to you. And, of course, if you enjoy a subject, you'll do well at it.

But the, in the last two years of my 'O' level course, we had a teacher who managed to suck all the joy out of it. Plus, his lessons were bedlam. It was a boys' grammar school in an area that threw up few problem children. Frankly, we were a pretty manageable bunch but this one lesson was chaos. It was impossible to learn. And so I took to running an earpiece along my blazer sleeve and I would spend the lessons listening to radio 1.

Naturally, my grades started to suffer, along with everyone else's. I'd learnt enough previously to manage to pass the exams we were set but I began to struggle particularly with unseen translations, whereby you are required to translate a passage of text you haven't seen before. Worse, if you failed the unseen translation in the 'O' level exam, you couldn't score more than a D, which was a fail.

After one particularly bad result in a test, this teacher kept me back to work through the translation. I still remember it was about a man in a marketplace. We spent twenty minutes going through this paragraph of text until I could practically repeat it by heart, although I hadn't really learnt anything of use, and then I was free to go.

I didn't revise very hard for my Latin 'O' level exams, destined to fail as I was, but I couldn't bring myself to do no work, so I went into the exam with good grasp of the basics and a sketchy idea about what we'd studied over the last two years plus a feeling of futility. Well, you've probably guessed what happened. I worked my way through the paper, my small, surprising successes overshadowed by the prospect of the unseen translation but when I turned that page - Blimey! - it was the piece about the marketplace.

There was no way the teacher could have known that would come up, although it did suggest that there was a book of texts from which the translations were selected, but as a result of this enormous piece of luck I managed to get a 'B' in my Latin and thus avoided failing any of my 'O' levels. Hurrah!