THERE was once a troublesome priest called John Wycliffe who trod a perilous path during the late 14th century.

His ideas anticipated the growth of Protestantism in England and I'm proud to say his church was in a small town near to where I grew up.

Ten years after his death, the authorities ordered that his bones should be dug up, burned and thrown into the nearby River Swift. For successive centuries, schoolchildren were taught that the recalcitrant cleric's ashes travelled down the Swift, along the Avon, into the Severn, down the Bristol Channel and out into the ocean - thereby spreading the message of Christianity.

Nearly 600 years later, at the age of eight, I tried to apply the theory to another substance, namely maths homework. Clutching the arithmetic-studded graph paper, I dived fully-clothed into the deepest pool I could find in order to rid myself of the hated subject.

When I got home, I lied that I had accidentally slipped into the brook and sadly, my maths homework had become obliterated. However, my mother examined the sodden paper and jubilantly announced that as the numerals could still be deciphered, she would try to copy out the equations so that I would not be deprived of that night's dose of pure and applied misery.

This she duly did - and within 20 minutes, I was dry and trying to fathom out the mysteries of logarithyms. The only conclusion we can draw is that maths homework does not travel as easily down the river Severn as the bones of dead priests.

l LATE summer and poor old Barbourne Brook is littered with empty beer cans and plastic.

Gheluvelt Park is a living memorial to brave men who fought and died for their country. I wonder what they would have thought of this rubbish-strewn, sad little stream.