Our poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, writes poems that must be blessings for schoolteachers, because almost every line has a splinter of brilliance in it, and even the most resistant pupil would notice a fragment of language jumping into life. Her poem called Mrs Midas evokes the difficulties for a wife whose husband turns things to gold when he touches them. They can’t sleep together, so she puts him in the spare room, which he turns into “the tomb of Tutankhamun”. What young mind would not be captured by an idea as dazzling as that? I know, the young mind of the boy at the back of the class who has just set fire to his desk. He’s a kind of Midas himself, but whatever he touches turns to chaos. It’s always rude to be optimistic on behalf of other people, and the teacher is facing difficulties every day that leave Mrs Midas looking genuinely well off, instead of just weighed down by useless wealth.

At our weatherboard one-room infants’ school in the bush, the memorably severe Miss Cashman had to get us to safety when the bushfire came, as it did every year, invariably threatening to burn down the building. She had a gift for discipline but no gift for tact. She gave me a note for my mother, saying that I didn’t have to come to school the next day because it had been largely destroyed by fire. My mother, once she had been assured that I had not been in danger, recovered in a matter of hours.

The bushfires were impressive, but they had nothing on the floods. One year the whole central eastern seaboard of New South Wales was underwater. The motor launch by which my mother and I were rescued from our holiday home on the Hawkesbury river was surrounded by millions of oranges dotted in the water, all torn from the orchards by a current quicker than a running man. In those days none of us realised that this was climate change, which would menace the whole world’s future. We thought it was standard-issue fire and flood menacing our bit of Australia right there in the present.

It was long ago, and I am far away; and it might snow tonight. I hope it does, because recently I wrote a poem about snow which I think might have a few Carol Ann moments in it, although her enviable knack for making an everyday phrase split light like a prism is hard to match. Miss Cashman used to make us recite Dorothea Mackellar’s famous poem My Country. “I love a sunburnt country,” I would intone, while down in the gulley below the school the eternally recurring fire was turning its first gum-trees into columns of fury.