PASSED/FAILED: 'I was 516th Goblin and a Female Troll' ; An education in the life of Henry Gee, writer, scientist and Middle Earth boffin: [First Edition]

Henry Gee is a senior editor at Nature and the author of Jacob's Ladder, A Field Guide to Dinosaurs and, out last month, The Science of Middle Earth. He will be appearing at the Natural History Museum, London SW7 at lunchtime this Saturday and Sunday.

At my local south London primary, Fairlawn, I was beaten for getting my sums wrong and have never been very happy with subtractions ever since. We lived across the road from the Horniman Museum [in Forest Hill] and my first love was for museums, especially old-fashioned, shamelessly unreconstructed Victorian museums.

We moved to Croydon and I went to Park Hill primary. I had a good time there with Mrs Elias, a fierce and often unreasonable Welsh woman who would tell us about the 'porridge gun', a mythical blunderbuss that she used to draw on the blackboard. She read The Hobbit to us. I failed the 11-plus but...