I love Latin and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

When I was at school, I studied it using a text book called the Cambridge Latin Course, about a Roman family made up of a banker called Caecilius, his wife Metella and son Quintus – and Cerberus the dog.

We learned about the Roman Empire through their eyes: what they ate; how they lived. I seem to remember that in one later book in the series, they all emigrated briefly to Aquae Sulis (Bath) and had a merry old time there – before moving home, where Cerberus was tragically killed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Pompeii, where the Cambridge Latin Course fictional dog, Cerberus, sadly perished. Picture: Getty

You are probably by now assuming that I attended a fancy private school. I didn’t. I went to a very ordinary comprehensive in the north of England, which, by some strange twist of history, still employed the inimitable Mrs Dixon - a visiting Latin teacher - for a couple of hours a week. It is quite possible that they didn’t actually still employ her and she just continued to turn up every Tuesday and Thursday, as she had done for the previous 25 years, without anyone in senior management noticing.

Unlike most Latin scholars, who inevitably will have generally had a more solid foundation in the subject, we learned Latin in a two year crash course from scratch, aged 14 and then immediately entered into a GCSE exam. What was most unusual was that it wasn’t even taught as part of the school timetable, instead, anyone who signed up had to sacrifice one lunchtime and one PE lesson a week – the latter possibly being the main driver for my decision to take part.

Mrs Dixon had a comical way of pronouncing the word “huge”, which for some reason seemed to come up in every text.

"Ingens lupinotuum!” she would cry. “Uuuuuuuge werewolf!”

While arguably not a particularly useful phrase to learn, my school friends and I all still know the Latin for “huge werewolf”. We shout it at each other when we meet, 30 years later. We know how to party.

This two-year crash course for sport-shy nerds had a major impact on my life. I am, to this day, obsessed with the origins of words. I can spend hours studying maps of Europe marked with the translation of the word “potato” in every language (Google it, it’s fascinating). As an adult, I lived in Romania, where some describe the language as as close to Latin as Shakespearean parlance is to English, so it actually turned out to be very practical.

It may be a dead language, but I would still encourage anyone to study it, given the chance. Especially if they hate PE.

Jane Bradley is World Editor of The Scotsman

Latin may be a dead language, but it’s still better than PE