‘This is our sculpture of Ophelia’, I announced proudly, pointing at a pile of weed in a dirty stream. ‘And behind us, under that hillock, Jane Austen buried a relic of the Brontë sisters’.

My new colleagues were either genuinely impressed, or far too polite to question the importance (and in the case of the second, the viability) of these two claims. This was probably because they could boast no such treasures at their former place of employment – the Bradford-on-Swale College.