It is a shameful truth about me that I am often late.

My sister will tell you that I’d be late for my own funeral, which is unfair and not wholly accurate because mostly I do turn up for things and I’m good with public transport.

What is the case, though, is that from an early age I have always been chasing deadlines, and mostly unsuccessfully.  I ask for extensions.  I write shamefacedly apologetic emails.

And when I was a boy, my schoolwork was never in on time.

One of the people who suffered most from this was my history teacher, David Griffiths, known to everyone as DG, who received nothing, ever, from me on the allotted day.

Yet, no matter how frustrating a pupil I was, DG took the approach that to be angry with me was not productive and so instead he dealt with my atrocious time-management with wry amusement, gentle encouragement and what seemed like infinite kindness.

Now DG was a great teacher and I learned a lot from him, about the mid-Tudor crisis, for example, and the causes of the English Civil War; and I have forgotten practically all of it.

One of the oddities of the stories of Jesus is how much his pupils forgot. The four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, contain lots of the same stories, but not in the same order or with exactly same words.

But even though some of the facts are sketchy, the sense of how Jesus taught is absolutely consistent; he was kind, he was loving, he had time for people. He didn’t stress over deadlines.

I reckon that most of us recognise that sort of teaching.  We remember kindness long after we’ve forgotten the composition of the Rump Parliament or how to calculate the area of a circle.  Because it’s the kindness that changes us.

A few days ago, I gathered with hundreds of friends, family and former pupils to celebrate DG at his funeral, where I was, ironically, though not inappropriately, late; and where, despite his eminence, none of us talked about early-modern England.  Instead, we laughed a lot and spoke of DG’s warmth, his good humour and his generosity of spirit.

And we recognised what it is that great teachers are always teaching: it’s not how to be top; it’s how to be better.