I GOT a D in my Latin O-Level. We spent our lessons waiting for the caped teacher to turn his back on us to chalk on his blackboard and then we would lob rubbers high into the ceiling.

The ceiling in the Latin room was falling in. You could see the splintery snapped ends of the thin laths from which all the plaster had fallen onto the desks below.

A direct hit on a lath from a Latin scholar and the classroom would be filled with a powdery shower and - hopefully - something more substantial. Then the declensions would have to be declined and lesson abandoned.

There are times when I regret it.

Usually too few to mention.

But today...

Hurworth's most famous son is mathematician William Emerson. I'm writing next week's Echo Memories about him. His tomb in Hurworth churchyard has Hebrew and Latin inscriptions on it.

I've found a translation for the Hebrew, which is about the universal nature of death: "Then said I in my heart, as it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me.”

A Latin translation escapes me. It's as if all the people who wrote about Emerson in the past took it for granted that everyone had a working knowledge of Latin and so they could get away without translating. Now it comes to my generation, and all we are expert at is aiming an eraser at a hole.

So I'd be delighted if anyone can help translate:

Quod sub pedibus sepultum et neglectum jacet aliquando fuit Gulielmus Emerson; vir priscae simpli citatis, summae integritatis, rarissimi ingenii, quantus fuerit mathematicus. Si scripta ejus perlegeris, quor sum narraret saxum si non perlegeris, perlege, et scies. Obiit 21 Maij, 1782 aetat. an 81. Juxt sepulta jacet Elizabetha, uxor, quae obit 27 Martii, 1784, aetat. an 76.