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.