Isn't it. Merry Christmas to you too!

Way back in 1904 she wrote: “We have had no time to dream of the powers possessed by children.” Her schools became a space where - years before the rise of “Assessment Objectives” and other mind-forged manacles - children might learn happily and healthily; as Wordsworth said, without loss of power.

Rebecca West - who saw her being flung to the pavement like a “sack of grain” by policemen at a suffrage protest - said that if she had walked into parliament and asked for it to be turned into a playground for local children, they’d have a hard time refusing her.

McMillan was just one “fresh-air fanatic” of this era, as Raphael Samuel called them. She advocated play and practical activity in education as well as what we’d now call public health interventions. Writers like George Bernard Shaw and J.B. Priestley visited her schools and paid homage to her.

I wrote a section of my PhD on Margaret McMillan and her pioneering open-air school at Deptford, but I was today years old when I discovered that a nursery school was opened up with her name in Brighton in the 1930s.