We had thirty children on the trip and split them into four groups. They had a rota of activities to do over the five days we'd be there. These included a spot of climbing, walking up a mountain, horse riding and some touristy stuff.

On the first day I was assigned to a group doing a tour of a castle and then a trip on an open-top bus into the town of Broddick. On this particular day I was with Miss English who is the English teacher I used to have a crush on. We're both very young and look even younger so when we arrived for our castle tour and said who we were the guides were busy trying to spot the teacher.

I'd go into great detail about our tour of the castle but it was more of an old stately home. As a boy I have virtually zero-interest in such things, whereas my colleague and friend was asking lots of questions and probably dreaming of being a Duchess. I was dreaming of being somewhere else.

I was rather scared when we went in the adventure playground after the castle tour as the kids ran all over the place. As a child such places are an opportunity for adventure and fun, as a teacher they have the potential to turn you grey and give you a heart-attack. I have two words for you: zip and wire.

From here we got an open-top bus into Broddick. I swear blind that Lewis Hamilton was driving it because we were screeching round the bends and very nearly taking off. It's safe to say that bus drivers on Arran are all complete lunatics. The kids were grabbing hold of branches on passing trees. It was utterly terrifying. I told them that if anyone asked Miss English and I were sixth-formers and we were from a local rival school. For her part Miss English really put her back into pretending to be a kid. She even got one of the year nines to give her a piggyback. I'm not sure giving rides to English teachers has been risk-assessed so I should perhaps delete the photo I have of this.

Incredibley we made it to the bus-stop without crashing or anyone falling out of the bus. In Broddick we discovered that small Scottish towns aren't designed for anyone under the age of seventy. It was quite dull so when I was doing a group photo it was tough trying to get a smile out of them. This was until I told them that the Hungarian word for cheese is 'shoite' - my Sister-in-Law is Hungarian in case you're wondering how I know that. They greatly enjoyed this and it became a bit of a word of the week: I want to go to the shop and ask for some shoite. This is shoite. On the bus on the way back we even went past a shoite factory. I felt quite embarrassed when we got back to the hostel and they were telling Miss Enco (Learning Support teacher) about this word I'd told them. She raised her eyebrows at me but fortunately she has a sense of humour so quite enjoyed it herself. When they get back to school they have to tell everyone that some random Scottish person told them the word.

During the day another girl managed to injure her ankle. She made the most of it though and really put alot of effort into hobbling around. Seeing as she would have been going up a mountain the next day there were suggestions that she was doing a bit of a Cristiano Ronaldo and was putting it on.

In the evening we got them to write diaries about their day. This was a common theme for the week and I loved it when they wrote about me. Even if the main strands were writing about my pathetic catching abilities or about me teaching them a strange new word. I hope the head doesn't end up reading them.

I was rudely wakened by my alarm clock at six in the morning last Sunday morning. It's a slightly disturbing and unwelcome experience getting up at that time on the Lord's day. I was a little surprised that my alarm clock would even let me set it to go off at that time on a Sunday. It hadn't helped that one of my friends had texted at eight o' clock the previous night to see if I wanted to go for a quick pint, that became two, three and then four quick pints in the end.

I was about to head off on year nine camp on the Isle of Arran in Scotland. We were setting off from school at eight-thirty. I picked up a colleague on the way and made it there in good time, albeit feeling a little groggy. One advantage of driving at that time on a Sunday morning is the complete absence of traffic.

It was raining when we got there and we were made to wait by our coach arriving late. Quite how a privately hired bus can be late on a Sunday morning is beyond me but that's buses for you. For all I know two more arrived just after we left.

The following seven hours travelling were a mix of half-sleep, reading a book and overhearing a game of eye-spy featuring 'welegraph wires'. The notable occurances of the journey were one girl being so desperate for the toilet she started crying and one boy throwing up on another. All this within an hour of setting off.

I didn't know it at the time but the camp would turn out to be an epic adventure and one of greatest experiences of my life, if not the outright greatest. But on the coach it was hard to imagine, I was feeling seriously hungover and didn't know many of the kids. We made it to the ferry port without any more 'incidents' and had a smooth crossing.

Upon arriving in Arran I was awestruck by the scenary. We were quickly whisked away to the youth hostel that would be our base for the next week along winding roads that undulated like a rollercoaster. It was glorious going past all these giagantic mountains and my mouth hung wide-open. That was before we saw the deer on the hillsides and it dropped another centimetre that I would previously have thought to have been impossible. Then we saw a seal and I had to dislocate my jaw.

Our first night we just got acclimatised and played a quick game of rounders. This was my chance to demonstrate to the kids why I'm a maths teacher and not a PE teacher. By this I mean I failed to catch ninety percent of the balls that came my way not that i proved myself to have an IQ of more than twenty-seven. In my defense the wind was causing the ball to swirl around in the air, though unsurprisingly this excuse fell on deaf ears.

Before bed-time the same girl who'd needed the toilet on the way up managed to injure her ankle. Not a great start for her but she proved lated in the week that she was in fact quite a tough cookie.

Nevertheless we had arrived in one peice - just about - and we were up and away.