In 1962 my parents moved from Nottinghamshire to Derbyshire, a physical distance of only 20 kilometres, but in other ways to a new world. Our new house was actually a kind of old house on the edge of Crich village, surrounded by small dairy farms and people who spoke a brand of English that would have sounded familiar to Geoffrey Chaucer.

Look up Crich now and you will find it is known for the Tramway Museum, which we have never forgiven for bringing weekend tourist traffic into our dozy arcadia, and a TV series set somewhat improbably in the village. In 1962, all that was in the future.

The area's past is more interesting anyway. Two or three times in recorded history it has been at the focus of big things. Florence Nightingale hailed from Lea Hurst, not a couple of miles away, and went on to found the profession of nursing as we all know it. Nearly three hundred years earlier, the Babington Plot was hatched just up the road at Dethick, and if you have to pick one point in space and time where the industrial revolution started it could well be Cromford, where Richard Arkwright sited his first powered cotton mill. Dozy it may be, but there was a moment when the world turned about this spot.

As for me, after four years of village schooling which, following Mark Twain's dictum, I never allowed to interfere with my education, I graduated to the "grammar school" in Belper - a 10-kilometre walk every time I missed the bus in one direction or the other. There I was duly introduced to the world of formal learning. It would be nice to report being fascinated by that, but the truth is I found most of it tedious and was much more involved in sport and such (spot the mention) at any rate until the last year or two before moving on to university.