Why are school trips so exotic?

It has been hard to avoid the story about the teacher struck off for having sex with a pupil in the loo of a plane. It’s a grubby tale that becomes more unedifying by the moment (witness the brother claiming that she has been blackmailed for being too “good-looking”).

Leaving aside the offences, the thing that most interests me is that they were on a plane. Four years ago, Jeremy Forrest was jailed for having sex with a pupil… and it was alleged they first became close on a school trip to Los Angeles. When I was young, we went to Iron Bridge.

A colleague tells me that her oldest child’s first school trip was to a recycling plant down the road; her fourth child travelled to Sri Lanka.

Send them up a chimney, I say.