Corporal punishment was banned in state schools in 1987 and in private ones 11 years later. That was too late for me. Four of us returned to school with booze and cigarettes one Saturday night.
If switching on all the lights had not given us away, Black Sabbath booming at full blast most certainly would.
And we deserved to be caught for our stupidity if nothing else. Smoking and drinking on the premises was a caning offence, so we knew what was coming on Monday.
The subsequent painful thrashing by the head teacher was eased slightly by the six pairs of underpants I was wearing, secretly filched from the family airing cupboard before leaving home that morning.
But the pointlessness of such casual violence was not lost on me. I don’t smoke or drink now, but I did for years afterwards, so it wasn’t much of a deterrent.
And I never saw the head in quite the same light again. His willingness to brutalise children diminished him in my eyes.
But none of us felt we had been unfairly treated. We knew the rules and the penalty for breaking them. There were no complaints on that score.
Yet the rules-based order is now breaking down because it is being applied haphazardly and inconsistently or simply being ignored. And sometimes, because the rules don’t fit the circumstances.
Donald Trump is once again threatening to take Greenland, or as he called it on Truth Social, “that big, poorly run, piece of ice.”
From the White House to our house, Donald Trump's rule-breaking is all the rage - Nigel Nelson | Getty Images
Greenland belongs to Denmark, a Nato ally. And when the defensive block was founded in 1949, no one thought it necessary to have a rule preventing one member from invading another on the grounds that no rational leader would ever contemplate such a thing.
Rapper Kanye West should never have been invited to perform in Britain following his foul antisemitic outbursts. But does that give Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood the unquestioned right to ban him from our shores altogether as not conducive to the public good?
That is normally used for denying entry to terrorists, spies and criminals or someone intent on inciting violence. There’s no evidence the singer planned to do any of those things.
When Yvette Cooper was in Shabana’s shoes, she proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, a ban subsequently ruled unlawful by the High Court. The Government is now appealing its decision.
Palestine Action is an unsavoury group which now shares a blacklist with the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic State and al-Qaeda. But is there really an equivalence with those mass murderers?
Which makes our terror laws seem a bit skew whiff. All the more so if 2,700 generally law-abiding people, including vicars and octogenarians, are sent to jail for 15 years for showing their support.
We lived under Covid rules, little changed since the Black Death came to Britain in 1348, until freed by vaccines – social distancing, travel restrictions, masks and lockdowns.
Lockdowns worked, but flimsy surgical masks didn’t because the virus was airborne. The tier system was farcical and eat-out-to-help-out madness.
The rules-based order relies on getting all the rules right if public confidence is to be maintained. Which brings me to bins, mandated by legislation introduced last month. I live in a village built before wheelie bins were invented.
Most homes here do not have places to put them, so they are going to end up in the street. Where people put their cars and parking spaces are at a premium. I foresee civic pandemonium on the horizon.
Our local authority does not seem to have thought this one through. And a rules-based order not thought through goes wonky. All the way from the White House to our house.
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