Another week, and another teacher and a considerably younger pupil hit the headlines for a romance deemed by the people around them to be at best inappropriate, at worst sick (apart from the social workers, quelle surprise).
Jess Anderson is now 16, Clive Richards is 49 and her former Religious Education teacher. He was a married father when they reportedly began their relationship - now they have left their respective homes to be together.
It is Jess's view that they have done nothing wrong; it is my view that, in about ten years' time, she will be in the throes of depression, angry at having her youth dominated by someone who took advantage of it, and in 20 years' time, in therapy to help her move on with her life and catch up with those stolen years, which is exactly what they will be.
How do I know? Because I have been there.
I swore that I would never write about this. I did not want to share certain aspects of my personal life with my family and friends, let alone the wider public.
And so, many years ago I invented a persona: a happy-go-lucky person, totally at ease with her sexuality, and someone who enjoyed the social scene of drinking and partying that my job as a journalist involved. But I am weary of trying to be that person and know that if I do not speak out on what, to me, has been the most destructive experience of my entire life, I will not be able to move on completely.
There are things - namely, very successful therapy and fantastic friends - within the past five years that have enabled me to do so, and thank God for them; but heck, it has taken a long time.
I am now 49, and my relationship with a teacher wrecked well over 30 years of my life, rendering me incapable of enjoying any other healthy relationships, either physical or emotional, for most of my life. It left me depressed, self-harming, suicidal, and, most devastating of all, hurt and angry to a point of incapacitation in my writing, the thing I love most.
It should never have been like this. I enjoyed a happy childhood. I had two wonderful parents, a brother whom I adored (we have still only had three arguments in our lives - all about sport on TV) and I loved school.
I had moved from the very progressive Durham Road Junior School in Newport to a quiet country school in Coity, just outside Bridgend, where, very frustratingly, we were given every afternoon off.
I went from doing algebra to making straw baskets and, every morning, taking the cream off the top off the free third of a pint of milk we were given by the Government (those were the days) to make a teaspoon of butter by shaking the cream up and down in an empty coffee jar.
But, despite the lack of intellectual stimulus, I enjoyed life. My mother was, by Coity's standards, very trendy. She bought me a psychedelic crimplene dress and a cow bell on a rope to wear to school in 1969.
Indeed my only unhappy memory was when my mum, a hairdresser, gave me the only afro perm in form five at Brynteg Comprehensive secondary school. I went home sobbing at lunchtime and she took it out with the very same high volume mix of peroxide she had used to put the damned thing in in the first place.
No, it was only when I met Jim (as I shall call him) that everything started to go wrong for me. He began teaching me when I was 15. He was 30, tall and very attractive, but back then I was a girl of no experience from a church background whose excitement stretched only to kissing a boy called John in a green M&S sweater at a friend's party (funny how you remember the details).
There were a few dabbles after him, most notably Stephen, who, upon catching glandular fever, 'confessed' to his mother that he had kissed me in After Church Fellowship (wasn't that what the 'after' was all about?) and I was cast out as a sort of pre-HIV plague carrier. Apparently, he was being 'saved' for the organist's daughter, who, ironically, ran off with the married vicar. You never can tell.
So, when I came into contact with Jim, I was an innocent, insecure, spotty, short 15-year-old, with very little experience of the ways of the world or the men who inhabited it. I was far more obsessed with work than boys, and most of my friends were the same.
And yet, within a couple of years, these men, most of them school heads of departments, had wrecked our lives (I was not the only one to be targeted and seduced) under the guise of excitement, daring and expectation.
It would be some years before we would come to recognise the damage they had caused, and many more years before it would be possible to forgive and move on. Some never have.
When Jim was simply my teacher, he was terrifying. Although he achieved wonderful exam results, he did so often through a discipline that could reduce pupils to tears - which he often did with me. He had his favourites: 12-year-old Wendy, with whom he inappropriately smooched and groped during one school dance.
At such events, he was always nipping off for walks around the school grounds with different female pupils, invariably the well-endowed ones. Breasts were his obsession.
During the hot summer weeks, he refused to open classroom windows, insisting that girls take off their sweaters and cardigans instead.
It was seedy, infantile behaviour, but with a limited teenage emotional barometer there are many things you accept as the norm.
I was three days past my 16th birthday when I first came into contact with Jim outside the classroom.
There was another school dance and, in the excitement, I had missed the last bus home. I asked Jim for a lift, as he lived close by me, and he told me to wait by his car.
Once inside, he pounced, trying to kiss me. It was unexpected and unwelcome. I pushed him away. He tried again. This time I pushed him a little more forcefully. Then a third time. 'Jesus Christ,' he said, 'you're a hard one,' and drove off angrily.
The next day in school, he was all smiles and, a couple of days later, told me to go to his classroom at break, as he had a birthday present for me.
When I arrived at the classroom, he called me over to a cupboard and handed me the gift - two tiny pairs of lacy briefs - and bent down to kiss me.
As someone who had been wearing M&S tents posing as pants since she was born, the present was mystifying; the advance, again unwelcome.
It was several weeks before that changed. I was deeply unhappy at home. My father's business was going under, and that had created much tension. The mental illness of a close relative was also adding strain and I was having trouble studying.
At one point, I considered leaving school, getting a job and moving into a bedsit; I had also started suffering from migraine and depression.
What Jim offered was someone to talk to and it was he who encouraged me to stay on at school. I started to baby-sit for him, largely to be able to get on with my work in peace and quiet, and quickly fell in love with him. I also became friends with his wife.
At the moment, Jess Anderson says she is in love. I do not doubt the depth of her feeling; I had, and, if I am honest, continue to have, a degree of love for the teacher with whom I became involved; but I also know that it is a love based on inequality; an obsession.
Although ours was not a full sexual relationship when I was Jess's age (that came over four years later), my life revolved around this man.
I joined the rugby club in order to see him; I used to hang around quiet bits of forestry close to school at night, just to snatch five minutes alone with him.
In school, he used to touch me under the table during lessons; I stayed behind after school to 'tidy the cupboard'; I became involved in many after-school activities, just to see him for no matter how brief a time.
It was all a welcome escape from my 'real' life and the secrecy was thrilling; it was also flattering to have the attentions of an older man, and a teacher to boot, at a time when I felt sexually inadequate among my contemporaries.
So I know exactly how Jess feels: excited, loved, treasured, grown-up, independent, sexually liberated. But the truth is this: a relationship with any person in a position of authority that is greater than your own undermines you - and even more so if you are, as Jess is, 33 years younger.
....which makes everyone else sick!!!! 
