AS SURELY as a perky apple swells on the tree, slowly maturing from the branch to the barrow under the sky’s many curtains – so the human moves from the singular to the plural, from the individual to the collective.

Actually, that is not entirely true. We also have an early stage in life when the “he” or “she” is “they”. You may recall this from the first meeting between your mother and the infant school teacher. Although you were present in your grey flannel shorts or pleated skirt – and I favoured the shorts being a conventional young chap – with your ankle socks untwisted and your face polished to the shine on a priest’s funeral shoes, the conversation was conducted over your head, as though you were a slow-witted spaniel, utterly unable to determine your future.

“Of course, at this stage, they like bright colours, reds, blues and yellows,” says the teacher, who is thinner than a mop-handle with a crumb perched on the most persistent whisker of her downy moustache. At this point, I wanted to disagree vehemently. “But I don’t like bright colours. I like the sullen colours of a brooding Scandinavian landscape, where suicidal Swedes discuss the futility of existence.”

But you are not allowed to speak. You are a “they” not a “he”. “They like jolly tunes about little birds, honey bees, Jesus and nice houses and gardens, with occasional references to the heroes and heroines of our glorious past,” she continues, brushing a cloud of chalk dust from her wind-resistant tweed skirt.

Not true, I like Celtic laments about our noble warriors being butchered in the mud by the cruel king’s bloody soldiers, I thought. But the teacher is oblivious to the rebel soul, as she canters on. “We find that the boys are very good with symmetrical shapes, such as squares, triangles and oblongs, which they like to fit into each other, while the girls prefer letters and colours.”

Untrue again! “I like bulky, squiggly shapes that you have to push and shove and force into the other ones,” I mumbled to myself, but the teacher’s mind was accelerating towards the most important point of all.

“If they (he) have (has) not been fully potty-trained, they (he) will be stationed at a desk by the door to prevent accidents,” she says, placing a stray crayon into the groove at the top of her desk, where shone the dreaded ruler.