browsing the letter c

The baffling french output of Darren Brown, who refused to learn any other French words than "C'est". To make it up to a full sentence, he added the English words "with relish". This, he said often and plenty, and did not limit to French classes.

Defensive self-mockery. Should you fall over, or make a fool of yourself, this 'confession' will hopefully reduce external piss-taking. However, there are no guarantees.

"Cack" was our word for excrement - solid, liquid, cold or still steaming. Immortalised in the nursery rhyme,

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester,
In a shower of cack.
The dozy twat forgot his hat,
And it all ran down his back.

At least on this journey he was spared the indignity of stepping into a puddle of shit that went right up to his middle; although this must have been before that occasion, considering his oath never to return to Gloucester at the conclusion of that episode.

In fact, considering his adverse reaction to just getting his legs wet in the classic rhyme, you'd imagine a faecal downpour running over his head and face, before trickling its moist brown path along his spine would have caused a much earlier embargo on Gloucester-going, that might have spared him the unfortunate puddle incident.

I bet he liked it, the Hippocratic scatwizard.

A game in which you cak yourself.
The game of Cak requires a cricket ball to be thrown into the top of a conker tree, under which the cak players wait keenly for it, risking a skull-splitting thunk on their head.
Conker trees magnify the noise of the ball smashing into the branches, you can even feel it through the ground. Plus they're teasingly difficult to see through when in full leaf. Your ideal Cakking Tree will provide a throwing route up through the branches while also acting like pinball machine when the ball tumbles back down through the foliage.
This fearsome game was played regularly by about 10 of us for 4 years at school. And no-one died.
Martin K. got 'bonsed', as he was nonchalantly eating a sandwich. He failed to heed the cry of "cak", and he paid with his forehead. This marked Martin?s retirement from the game. The game of Cak.
Another innovation was the 'no looking up? round. This meant a steely-eyed battle of wills and terror rush where the sounds from above make you taste the adrenaline like metal.
Teachers would not stop the game of Cak, because they didn?t want to believe what we were doing. When one teacher asked what we were up to, possibly thinking we were terrorising a squirrel, we simply explained that it was "festive". He seemed happy enough with that.

Mr Thomas and Callum Savage developed an unhealthy rivalry. Mr Thomas took us for registration, music, and PE. The genuine wrestling match in registration was entertaining, especially since Callum appeared to be winning. The music room fiasco where Callum broke a Maraca by hitting Mr Thomas with it was even better. By far and away the best was the time Callum was bowling in softball (they're not soft, by the way) Mr Thomas stepped up to have a go, batted the ball stright back into Callums face, knocked him out cold and broke his nose. Kudos to Mr Thomas for finding the only accidental way to really hurt the boy.

Calypso Cups - fruit drinks packaged in brittle plastic containers - were the perfect size to place in a blazer pocket, and thus in exactly the right place for someone to punch, causing a whale-like spurt of sticky liquid up the owner's blazer. Pocketing the Calypso Cup is a beverage faux pas you make once, and once only.

No sooner had the Biafrans and Ethiopians all been fed with cheeseburgers and said "thanks the West we couldn't eat another thing", the Cambodians started starving too. So Blue Peter wheeled out the thermometers again, and did what Blue Peter did best - distilled an involved tale of tragedy into a single word insult.

"Cambo" wasn't used to insult the thin kids. The pot-belly of malnutrition made it look like those poor, poor children had been walking like Pac-Men, greedily scoffing air.

A Cambo was therefore a child so desperate for food that they will eat air or sand in addition to their already huge rations of chips and Aztec bars.

Started by Camel (Thomas Wells) who, after two years at our primary school was taken out, ostensibly to be educated at home. To become a member of the club you had to be "Humped" by Camel himself or any other member of the club. Humping involved a strange bumping of Camel's chest onto your back while he shouted "HUMP!" God knows what it looked like to the bemused teachers and fourth years who stood watching us being chased around the playground, all of us wanting desperately to be humped but at the same time all being vaguely aware of the sexual connotations and knowing it was very wrong. Once initiated into the club your role was to hump any non-member in sight. You also got to go to club meetings where Camel would point out Camel Land on his map of the world and issue strange, coded orders. This is probably how cults start. Camel left our school not long after his club died out, due to a lack of new members to hump.

What will eventually happen if someone writes Caramel Tart on a chalkboard in the school canteen. I laughed for pretty much the rest of the week.

Roll-front wooden lockers were a gift to the catarrhal terrorist. You spend half an hour hacking up phlegm then select a locker. You slightly raise the front and then carefully dribble extremely glutinous phlegm - the Camel Yocker - into such a position that the locker front, when lowered, rests in it. Any subsequent raising of the locker front produces a glistening, nauseating curtain of yocker strands, preventing access to the locker's contents. If you were really lucky, you could distract the locker's owner at exactly the right time. He would then reach in without looking, pushing his hand through the napalm-like yocker waterfall.

At primary school there was a phase for building 'camps' along the edges of the playing fields. Pupils would dig out little trenches for toy cars and figures to play in. There were a lot of jealous reconnaissance strolls along the fields to check out the size and complexity of rival camps. Two of us had one along the back, and we planned to dig with tiny sticks under the train track so that we could run away to the Mysterious Cities of Gold. We didn't get very far.

During the height of the inexplicable Blockbusters mania of the eighties, it became a common "dare" in the class of a teacher - first name Robert - to ask "Can I have a 'P' please, Bob?" when you needed to go to the bogs. Sometimes you'd even get away with this. Unlike the perennial antagonist, Marty Halford, who once got a bit too excited, and asked "Bob, can I have a wank?".

A Tamil refugee came to our school. We found out that his parents had both been shot and spent many happy hours holding coins in front of his face saying "can you see it shine..." then under our breath we would add "...like the bullets..."

Decorative pastel coloured hoops strung onto elasticated string.

• Gasp one of the sweets between your teeth.
• Hook thumbs under the elastic and pull forward making it taut.
• Bite.<lo>Half for you - yum yum - and the other half goes flying at respectable speed into your target's head.

For extra targetting, go boss-eyed and use your nose as a crosshair.

Fond memories of primary school soggy boggies (q.v.) ensured that this habit died hard, and so many a breaktime in the first year of secondary school was spent rolling bits of the school-forged chocolate slab cakes into balls and throwing them at the polystyrene tiling of the canteen.

After a few weeks of this entertaining but artistically somewhat naïve practice, postmodernism set in when someone stood on a table to carefully attach a slice of cucumber onto the most recent crop of cake-based ceiling adornment.

The next day, the cucumber was still there. Days turned into weeks turned into months, and still it remained, clinging defiantly to the ceiling.
To our surprise and joy, it was still there when we started our second year the following September.

We made a pilgrimage to this spot after our last AS level exam, and lo and behold, there it was; brown, shrivelled, twisted, shrunken, but still recognisable as our very own slice of cucumber.

Our last AS exam was in May 2002. If anyone reading this is currently at Poynton High School, could you see if it's still there? If you enter the canteen from the main entrance, it's slightly away from the far right corner, the one with the heater thing on one wall and the windows/fire exit on the other.

Writing the name of your favourite band on your yellow canvas bag? Cool. Liking the Cure? Really cool! Decorating your bag with a lovingly rendered Cure logo? Kool and the fucking Gang!
However, make sure you finish the logo, and don't have a break half-way through the word, otherwise someone may write a crude "NT" after your lovingly crafted "CU". Well, they did to me, anyway.

This originated in the first year of high school. When Tej tried to drink a Capri Sun behind his bag during registration, we squeezed the drink thus making him 'down it' all in one go.

From then on, anyone seen enjoying the said drink was subjected to the Capri Sun Challenge.

A rank of sadness attained by those who have ever said "actually, I'm a dark elf". Higher ranks can be attained by being good at chess or having a basin haircut.

My friends and I will never be the same again after seeing a porno aged about 13 in which some filthy woman used some sort of vice like tool to open her own fahita wide up, until it was some rancid mockery of a flesh grotto. At our age, we just wanted to see boobs. We certainly didn't need that.

Scabby Queen
This is basically the game Old Maid. The "scabby" element comes from the punishment for losing, which is a number of scrapes to the knuckles with the whole deck. The number and violence of the scrapes is determined by cutting the cards (red = soft taps, black = full-blooded whacks, value of card = number of hits).
Convincing a gullible child that any card they draw is worth 20 and concealing a credit card in the deck prior to administering the scrapes will ensure maximum bleeding. If you're a schoolkid with a credit card, that is.

Scrapes
A 2-player game that saves all that fucking around with Scabby Queen rules. Player One cuts. Player Two gives Player One the appropriate number of scrapes as hard as they fucking well can. Player Two cuts. Repeat until either player can�t take any more.
There are arguably no real winners in this game. However, if the player administering the scrapes drops the deck of cards, the other player is entitled to give them fifty-two scrapes. I only saw this happen once, but it resulted in a hand that looked like it had got stuck in a bacon slicer.

Like Morrissey and Sade, this chromosome-laden girl was a constant source of mystery at school. Kept behind for a number of years, the six-foot tall behemoth lumbered around the playground stamping her foot and drooling. One way to pump up her wrath was to describe cruelty to hamsters, the one form of creature that she seemed to empathise with. Telling her that you had "raped a hamster until it popped" or had enjoyed "hamster pie for dinner" soon turned her into a raging fiend. There was a dark twist in the tale though, as after some nameless crime had been committed, and every bag in the class was searched, the soon-to-have-a-breakdown caretaker found a dead hamster in Carmel's bag. It was like seeing Jill Dando assasinate someone.

The online CASCAiD form with be back online momentarily.

This was developed by some group of genii in partial homage to the film "Fight Club"; the procedure went thus.

1. 10 to 20 to all the blokes in the year (excepting all the poofy ones who had girls for mates) would stand in a large circle (clothed, naturally.)
2. The members of the circle would throw whatever small change or trinkets they could muster into the centre of the ring. The amount of money (or cool stuff) would slowly pile up.
3. After some time, an enterprising and daring member of the circle would decide the amount in the pile was enough to offset the risk; he would get on the floor and try and grab it all.
4. And everyone would jump on him.
For the next thirty seconds the situation would degenerate into a writhing, screaming free-for-all, a mosh pit without the music or the kindness. If you were quick, you might make a profit of 10 to 20p every game, and only get your hand crushed a couple of times.

A sock on a cats head is officially the most hilarious thing known to humanity, as the cat in question will automatically go into retarded-driver-reverse mode and shuffle slowly backwards, bumping into things and making odd growly noises. The fun is spoiled, naturally, when parents arrive.
Although this board condones no form of animal cruelty, cats are the excepton. They SO reckon they're IT.

A tentative stage of feline sex that catshaggers often dispense with. During the early stages of sexual awakening, you may want to simply try fingering a cat, rather than sticking your whole cock in.

To play cat in a bag, you will need a cat, and two bags.
Double up the bags, and make holes in them for the cat's legs and head. When you have forced the doubtlessly reluctant cat into the bag, and wrestled it's little paws into the holes, quickly grab the handles of the bag and swing the cat around.
The cat will be held in place using the same magic that keeps water in swung buckets.
Some notes on cat in a bag;

1. As with all such games, scream the name of the game while you do it. Just as a bundy isn't a bundy without screaming bundy, cat in a bag requires a manic child to be screaming CAT IN A BAAAAG! as he runs through the playground.
2. Doubling up the bags will go some way to preventing a ripped bag, which will cause the cat to fly into your friend's mouth, and he'll go boss-eyed and make a comical "gulp" sound with a tail hanging out of his mouth.
3. You MUST swing the cat. Otherwise it will escape, and probably land on your face, and do a sick on you. To ensure absolute safety from re-purr-cussions, you might like to end the game by simply letting go of the bag.

Here are some more Catch 22s - from now on, all new ones will be put in this entry.
SPACKERS SAY NO
Q : Did you watch Spackers Say No last night?
A : No...
Q : Spackers Say No!
Saying yes is a blatantly false claim to have watched a programme that obviously wasn't on last night. Who are you trying to kid, spacker?

What you have to write if you suggest, during a House Debate, that you are having sexual relations with the Pope.

You should also mention in your letters that you now appreciate that the word 'git' is not appropriate for such a forum, even if it was used to describe Mussolini.

The circular whirring pads that can be found on industrial floor-buffers.
Any of Catriona's diseases can be passed on by contact with one of these pads.
You were immune from these diseases as long as your contact with the pad was limited to wanging it at someone else.

The noble art of cat shagging can result in two very different responses. For instance, in our school, it wasn't all that bad; Wayne Radford was a catshagger, yes. But no-one minded. However...

Pronounced Kay-vee. Used when getting up to mischevious caper at school. Somebody stands Cave and if a teacher comes along whispers Cave to alert the mischevious caper doers to the presence of authority. From the Latin for danger.

A real-life black man who hangs around in shopping centres offering ten dollars to smell children's feet. Children, although tempted, will generally decline from a mixture of fear and mistrust.

Cedric was our GSCE English teacher. I always thought this nickname was just childish alliteration, but the real reason soon became apparent.
During his lessons we would occasionally hear a long hissing noise, as he slowly but surely pissed himself.
He wore a catheter bag, which might explain why his pissing hissed, to be honest I never put my hand up and asked "sir, why does it make a hissing sound when you stand in front of class and piss yourself?"
Occasionally... this bag would develop a leak. And because he wore the same trousers everyday, a succession of dry salty tidemarks would develop around the crotch.
It is with a sense of shame - the man was incredibly nice - that I remember the whole class roaring with laughter. Cedric thinking it was due to his excellent depiction of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Us, because the more we laughed, the more it encouraged him to prance about and the bigger his wet patch would grow.
(I have checked this entry out with the author, and he swears blind that it is all true. And that's good enough for me. - Log)

Take a little plastic syringe from the science labs, hack up a load of flem, and put it in the syringe. Then slam the syringe down on the table as hard as you could, plunger first, causing the flem to rocket up and stick to the ceiling. It will then slowly drip down for the next hour, in long gloopy strands. Best done over someone else's desk.

A normal paper aeroplane, but with the names of over 200 celebrities written all over it. Primitive attempts to colour-code the celebrities were made (Bill Beaumont and Emlyn Hughes, being sportspeople, were brown) but didn't last. Aged 13, we did have a premature understanding of which celebrities had comedy potential. For instance, Bella Emberg made it onto the plane, as did Dustin Gee. Les Dennis didn't, and neither did Terry Wogan. Standards were high. Finally, we decided that we didn't want to throw the plane, in case we didn't get it back. Eventually, I think we sent it to Zzap! 64, in an attempt to get a mention in their Reader's Pages. They also ran a "joystick in unusual places" competition, and I made my best mate Paul draw a picture of a Seedy Casino With Topless Croupiers. Paul's own twist on the Casino was that it was inhabited solely by Bernard Cribbinses, with tassles coming from their nipples. I took a photo of my joystick on the page, but - sadly - it didn't come out properly, and looked rubbish. I sent it anyway.

The alter-ego of a boy who suffered from an irritatingly real form of mental illness. Cha Man had no special powers. In fact, he was lacking many of the powers that ordinary people had. Such as anything you care to mention. Cha Man was - incredibly - tolerated by 200 other children, whose kindness was also their cruelty. See Cha-Copter.

Designed by master craftsman Paul Daft, the Cha-Copter was a gift to Cha-Man. It was no faster than the Cha-Mobile, and indeed, no higher. It merely required more movement on Cha-Man's part, and thus made him far more excited. Indulging this fantasy may well have prevented Cha Man's integration into society on a permanent basis, as he is still a mong. He works in the Arnold branch of Sainsbury's. Check for the enormous overbite.

How Cha Man gets from A to B. The Cha-Mobile involved Cha-Man running around with his hands in front of him (as though he was gripping a steering wheel, of course) and going "cheeyyaaaaa" at a continually rising pitch as he gained speed. He would 'change gear' when he ran out of breath, and start again.

The name of an unfortunate young man, whose parents must have been thinking in one of two ways;
- Let's distract everyone from the surname. Let's give him forenames so preposterously poncey that by the time people have got around to saying the surname, they'll already be punching him.
- Fuck it, we're Gays. We were born to be bullied, bring it the fuck on.

An odd game. Involved walking around the playground on the lines - those painted to represent the netball court, football pitch, etc. - without bumping into anyone else. If a bump occured the two bumpees must sing the chorus of Diana Ross' most joyous hit single.

Large cocks drawn on the seats of chairs so that it looked like you had your flaccid member nestling on the seat between your legs. Tipp-Ex was ideal for adding two or three drops of flying jism.

Not to be confused with a more sinister nob, drawn further back on the seat. If you sat on it this meant that you thought it was a real nob, and you had leapt onto it in the hope that you would get bummed by classroom furniture.

5th year Geography techer so named because we noticed that he used to itch his bits on the corner of his desk. So one lesson we covered all four corners with chalk - a different colour on each corner. By the end of the lesson it was like Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dream Trousers.

An unwise time to secretly scratch your balls is when wearing polyester / viscose mix trousers after using the blackboard. There is bound to be some chalk left on your fingers, and this will transfer directly to your crotch. So clear are the markings that pupils can distinguish a simple ball scratch to a pinching rearrangement of the penis.

"Can you lend me 50p?" could quite rightfully be answered with "What do you think it is, Charity Week?" Typically, denser characters took the insult to illogical conclusions. "What time is it?" "What do you think it is, Charity Week?"

Brett was our fun class scapegoat. Each break time we would playfully chase him across the playing fields until we caught him, whereupon a joyfully mild beating would be administered.
I thought of this as run-of-the-mill schoolboy horsefoolery, until my mate from another class furnished me with a more objective viewpoint. He had one of those teachers who would keep students back on any flimsy pretext, so his class often got to see our fun. He provided me with this description.

• The bell would ring. There would then be a gap of some 30 seconds, during which his entire class would stare out of the window.
• Like a panicked Gazelle, Palfrey would spring out from the buildings and beat a breakneck path across the playing fields.
• There would be a further gap of about 5 seconds, as an underfoot thunder gathered force.
• The doors burst open, and a screaming mess of boyhood (containing a significant number of the rugby team) throttled towards the fleeing Palfrey.
• Palfrey would be engulfed. His bag, ejected from the melee, would follow a graceful parabola before showering the ground with his books.
• The cloud would then disperse, cheerfully discussing the whimsical dusting-down that had just been meted out.
• A broken Palfrey forlornly picked up his books, put them back in his bag, and waited until he could get back to the comparative safety of the classroom.

Any thrill which causes adolescent excitement is a cheapy. You "get your cheapies" by becoming embarrassingly over-excited at any mention of sex, violence, snuff movies, girls pants etc.

Used pejoratively as a self-regulating disciplinary mechanism amongst groups of teenage boys:
"Eugh! Smiffy's getting his cheapies"

a real, exceptionally scummy street in birmingham where all prostitutes, including your mum, work.

Pinch a flap of skin on your cheek between thumb and middle finger, then use the index to make a fold in the resulting bulge. Hey presto, you have something vaguely resembling a bald vagina on your face.
This was demonstrated to me aged 8, when I had never seen a cunt, didn't know what the word meant, and had no idea whether a bald cunt was funnier than a hairy one. It was on the guy's cheek though, so I laughed anyway.

A post Joey Deacon, post-Scoper word. Unusually considerate in that it was designed not to insult the victim directly, as they wouldn't know what you were on about. Currently seems to be growing in use, but still only widely used in the Essex/London area as far as I know.

When submitting entries to Law of the Playground, please try to make sure you're not ripped off your tits on a cocktail of amphetamines and brain retarders. For your delight, I bring you - the rather lovely Ch*r*ot*e Ac*ri*l!
At my school we had a supply freak called Mr Simmonds who looked like Chief Wiggum if he's opted for a Terry Nutkins haircut. He wasnt qualified to teach so instead he'd pick on the class punchbag and direct a tirade of abuse at him until old man simmonds face went red and he started spitting like a retard achieving his first masturbatory orgasm in a broken lift in the sahara. once the spitting had occured it was a signal for the whole class to erupt like a versuvius of snot in laughter at the victim who would generaly end up crying at the spectacle before him. We are still at a loss as to why he did this and why he called it cheese on toast but it generally happened at christmas after screening a video of him doing the laughing policeman at another school he wished he'd never left.

A classic scenario between mother and child. Either through the child's one-off expression of preference, or because the mother is simply mistaken, the mother gets it into her head that her son likes cheese sandwiches.
She will then give her son cheese sandwiches until he finishes his GCSEs. The son will at first eat them, because - after all - he likes cheese sandwiches. Soon, they will be left, rotting, in long-forgotten bag pockets and hedges on the way to school. After five years, the boy might even have to find new ways to walk to school, to avoid over-saturating certain roads with cheese fucking sandwiches.
I did bring this up with my mother in adult life, and she asked me why I didn't say anything at the time. But... you can't, can you?
NOTE : Use this effect to your advantage with less-visited and possibly housebound relatives, who will fill their home with your favourite thing, and you can go around there whenever you feel like it.

This was where you would get a packet of round maize balls (usually 6p and sometimes fortified with vitamins on the premise that anyone so poor as to eat them probably didn't have a healthy diet) and then insert them one-by-one under your foreskin, then pull your flap over them until they disappeared. You would do this for as many as you could and put them back in the packet. Then you would offer them around, safe in the knowledge that if anyone called your bluff, you could quite safely put your own cock cheese in your mouth.

The unbelievable but true name of an Australian who attempted the World Rolling Record in St. Albans. This involved rolling around the field, egged on by his colleagues. Egging on consisted of friendly kicks to the back.

I defy anyone to find a better use for a periodic table. Simply make rude words up from the available elements.
For example...BiTcH (bismuth, technetium and hydrogen), GaY, FUCK, PoO and especially SnOTi.

Magnesium ribbon - a favourite. Produces an intense white light when lit. Can cause temporary blindness if let off in someone's face.
Sodium - produces unimpressive fizzing display when dropped in a sink full of water unless you've got enough to simulate Krakatoa. Dunking a head in the fizz will cause extreme panic and some flailing.
Phosphorus - the heavyweight. Ignites on contact with the air! Imagine sticking it down someone's collar!
Master these three and you may move on to caesium, if you can get the key to the special cupboard.

An insult for boys or girls who have red faces. A superior insult to "Ding Dong, Avon Calling", as it completely robs the victim of any comeback. This is because, in essence, it makes no sense.

An alternative activity to looking at me, but one which unfortunately has the same outcome, to wit, losing your fucking teeth.

The old Wrigleys packs of chewing gum used to have 3 pictures on the back, one of a pair of lips, one of an envelope (no idea why) and one of a man putting litter in a bin. Tear the wrapper into three, mix them up and predict a friend's romantic future.

If you pick the piece of paper with the lips on, then someone's going to kiss you. If you get the envelope, someone's going to write you a love letter. If you get the bin, you're going to get dumped, which doesn't really work if you were single, but such is the scrambled logic of the hormonal pre-teen.

Dicking about on the stage in the main hall during an Art lesson, Danny Bailey and myself got bored and decided to throw random objects at David Forsyth, a confused young boy who used to draw pictures of axe murderers. Legend had it that his dad drew Count Duckula.
The first object that came to hand was a Chewit, and it was thrown a good 50 feet across the hall, hitting him square on the head and causing him to explode with shock, casting his pencils and drawing equipment into the air in a true comedy moment - it was probably the most accurate shot I've ever seen in my life.

I saw David Forsyth in a pub last year, and his girlfriend was better looking than mine, bastard.

This was a martial art invented and practiced in my secondary school. Pioneered by Matthew Roche and Jason Walker, it involved opponents (one-on-one or team event) running at each other at high speed, jumping into the air, whilst turning so that the bums of each opponent would clash. The main idea was to knock your opponent off balance in mid-air so that they would land flat on the concrete with a rather loud slap. It was also customary to chant 'chicken bumswing' in a mild Oriental voice whilst in battle.

Legendary local tramp who seemed to be based in the local scrap metal dealer. Fundamental to the legend of Chicken George is that he was actually a millionaire (honestly, a 17 year old boy with a scooter who hangs around with 12 year old girls says so). We found out later on in life that Chicken George had a Godly omnipresence, or moved around frequently, as he seems to have been the legendary local tramp for schoolchildren covering a twenty-mile radius.

Some remedial classes, because of the innately gentle nature of the mentally unexcellent, are sometimes charged with the care of several chickens. At Great Sankey High School, the use of being in the chicken group as an insult lasted until a child took it upon himself to destroy all the chickens with a spade.

A game on the BBC computers at primary school. I forget what it was called, and what the point of it was, but every now and then the screen would fill up with chickens and eggs and then the question would be popped "What came first, the chicken or the egg?"
I never knew the answer.

The use of the nail on the index finger of one hand to scratch the back of the other hand, repeatedly and continuously. The aim was to go past redness, rawness, and well into the open wound category leaving scabs for weeks and possible scarring. The really hard, and thus trendy people would rescratch partially healed scratches to ensure they were 'fresh'. The practice was banned in an assembly when a couple of kids got blood poisoning.

I believe that this is the best entry we have EVER had.
When I was a child these five girls used to love kissing me all at the same time! When they had finished I would proceed to punch this guy named Edward in the stomach!
Were YOU a bigger child stud than M*r*ay P*r*et? Perhaps you were snorting coke off a prozzies' tits at nine years old. We NEED to know.

After resisting all the uses of the chin for a long time (feeling that Baddiel and Newman had covered it adequately), here they are:

Giving someone the finger,except you stick up your pinky rather than your middle finger. Then you must bellow in a crap chinese accent "CHINESE RUDE FINGER" Thus avoiding the ire of the teachers as the gesture is neither rude nor particularly Chinese. (I was told this by a six year old called Emma)

A dangerous game to play if you are the teacher, and you suffer from B.O. The chances are that the children will return the phrase "Mr Gardiner smells of piss", and you will not know who to blame. You cannot punish anyone, so you will appear powerless. The children will see this, and be upon you in seconds, and you shall be a skeleton left to bake in the sun before home time.

Chinese Whispers is crap if, when you are not sure of a word, you replace it with "something" instead of the closest word to it. This happened in our class, and the end result was always "Something something something... something something something." Defeats the object of the game, really.

Put your fingers to the corners of your eyes and pull as directed whilst singing;
"My mum's Chinese" (pull both fingers up)
"My dad's Japanese" (pull both fingers down)
"Look what happened to me!" (pull one finger up and one finger down).
If this visual gag wasn't hilarious enough, imagine a pubescant girl singing "Chinese, Japanese, Mummy please, what are these?" whilst gesturing to her new, pert bahongas!
Boys can gesture to their dirty knees instead, but that's not as funny as TITS.

A touching ode to an incompetent Oriental farmer:
Ching Chong Chinaman went to milk a cow
Ching Chong Chinaman didn't know how
Ching Chong Chinaman pulled the wrong tit
Ching Chong Chinaman covered in shit.
In retrospect it's hard to imagine what 'the wrong tit' could possibly mean, although I suppose it could be the cow's tail.

At my primary school when someone said something that was blatantly untrue, like 'my dad drives a tank. He keeps it in the garage', the correct response was to push your tongue into your bottom lip and go 'urhhhhh chinny barbados'.

Perhaps one of the most terrifying of our fellow students was John Kennedy, whose mother was an albino aboriginal. John had really curly blonde hair and brown eyes and had severe psychiatric problems - like REAL problems. In our poorly supervised woodwork class he wreaked absolute havoc. I'm talking blitzkrieg Fucking terror here. He began by "just" smacking the back of the hands of the unwary with a wooden mallet. Anyone who placed their hands on a flat surface, like a bench, it was WHACK, like real fucking hard.nnSomeone took exception to this, someone pretty tough, like Michael Stravanides, and had a go at Kennedy. Kennedy simply upped the ante and armed himself with a chisel. He then began randomly trying to stab other kids with it. He cut his own hand open with it and daubed "Chisel Man" in his own blood on the front of his woodwork apron. When our teacher, Ray Arnold left the room, Kennedy would jump up like Chucky in those "Child's Play" films and scream "Chisel Man" then (and this was the terrifying bit) randomly chase someone around the room trying to stab them. No one was safe. You could be on what you thought were really good terms with him and still be the victim. He was real serious. He stabbed Veli in the arse "Midnight Express" turkish prison style. Veli had blood comin' out his arse and was screaming. We were all shit scared, but no one said anything and the teacher seemed to disappear from class for ages.nnAnother time he tried to put Bill Gavanoudis' head into the band saw - it was like the Fucking Shining or something, I mean I was in that panic state where you want to scream and run but just stand there laughing nervously and sort of dancing on the spot.nnI can't recall how it all ended, but Kennedy had left by form four. He was failing everything. I remember he grabbed Miss James and was kissing her, really rough and excitedly coz she gave him a pass on a geography assignment. He then dropped to the floor and spun around on one elbow yelling "Woh, Woh, Woh, Woh" like Curly from the three stooges. She was shit scared too - you could see it in her face.nnKennedy used to piss on car door handles at Chaddy shopping centre every night. His ability to seemingly piss at will and stop and start the flow was incredible. Veli finally got revenge on him for the Chisel incident by pushing him over the side of an escalator at Myer, He fell about 12 feet onto his face but didn't appear too fussed and "paid" Veli for what he had to admit was a pretty "good one". He could obviously admire the psychotic in others too. Kennedy's dress sense in retrospect was pretty cool. He wore tight blue jeans with big cowboy boots and a really tight lumber jacket. With his wild blond hair he looked like some crazy southern Jerry Lee Lewis style rocker. He HAS to be dead by now.

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The Chocolate Cock (paraphrased)
from "The Talking Teapot and Other Tales" by Enid Blyton

Once there was a piece of chocolate in the shape of a cock. The chocolate cock stood right in the very middle of a sweet-shop window, and all the children came to look at him. He was very proud of himself indeed - as would you be, if you were a huge delicious brown cock.

"I am the Chocolate Cock!" he crowed. "I am the Chocolate Cock! I am the handsomest bird in the world, for I am the Chocolate Cock!"

He was marked a shilling, and none of the children that came to look at the cock could afford to buy him. They just stood and looked at him, to drink in the staggering beauty of the massive over-priced chocolate cock they all wanted so badly to stick in their mouths and drag across their bodies, stencilling the edge of their bot-bots.

Sometimes the feelings in their tummies, a hunger that could not be sated by any other food, led the children to experiment with each other in front of the cock, while it looked at them with its imperious, milky eye. But one day the wife of the Duke of Edinburgh visited the shop, and said she didn't like all the little boys fucking each other outside his shop, so he got a farmer to kill them.

A turd. Also, a boy, Adam White. The 'chod' association happened before I moved to the area, but was revealed in such horrified tones that I never ever dared go near him for fear of catching chod disease. Odd 'chicken and egg' origin - was Adam known as Chod before he shat out of a tree, and so that's how shit became known as 'chod'? Or was shit always 'chod', and Adam assumed the mantle of 'Chod' only after he shat out of a tree? Never found out.

Directed with great relish at those who had lost an argument, displayed ineptitude or suffered from general misfortune, this insult was usually drawn out ("chee-yokeddd!"), accompanied by a dry cough, and the pinching of skin over the adams apple.

Not to be confused with the pinching of skin either side of the neck, which as everyone knows, is an Ethiopian eating a crisp.

Based on the grail selection scene at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Present the victim with two closed palms. Tell them to "Choose Wisely".
Whichever choice is made precipitates a violent assault, followed by gravely intoning "he chose poorly.." in the fashion of a 700 year old knight.

After a chinese girl gobbed in someone's (OK, my) face, the game of "it" was transformed into the game of "chow mein". Essentially the same game, but you're passing on a different condition.

Chris had (and indeed, has) a huge quiff which led to many hours of ridicule, as is to be expected. The insults really took off on the day that he feel asleep in English and woke to find that Ben Rock (known, coincidentally, as Violent Ben) had stapled his hair to the table with a huge wall stapler. The sight of Chris blundering about screaming with a table hanging from his head will stay with me until the day I die. He was eventually subdued and the table removed, but the scars, both mental and physical, remain. Please put this up, as if he sees it, he might finally get a fucking haircut.

Christening different new clothing required different rituals. Doctor Marten's boots had to be broken in by kicking someone harder than yourself up the arse. The more holes the boots had, the harder your target had to be. If the task was not completed that lunchtime, you would get kicked by all other DM wearers.

A good time to ridicule Jehova's Witnesses is to talk about your Christmas presents in front of one. In particular, ask four or five people what they got before you get to the Jehova, pause, then ask them what they got. Word of warning - make sure you do not ask a poor kid what they got in the build up, or else he might accidentally become the object of ridicule. See also knock knock jokes.

The name of a child with learning disabilites in my year. Because of his presence I was denied much of the spastic in-jokery that was prevalent amongst most schools at the time, as anyone caught making fun of him would be dealt with severely.
I'm quite grateful to him, because it is through him that I learnt how to deal with mentally handicapped people; generally, stare at the floor not saying anything and hoping they will go away, so you can stop feeling guilty. Oh, and empty gestures of friendship, like being forced by your mother to invite him to your birthday party.
When he left school, spastic jokes promptly became all the rage, even amongst the teachers.

The spraying of Deep Heat onto the testicles. A proper night-time chubbing requires a number of key roles. Least popular was the pulling down of the pyjamas, indifferent was the variable number of team members required to pin down the victim, and most prestigious was the chubber himself, who delivered the chub unto the naducles. This can go wrong (or spectacularly right, depending on your level of sadism and optimism) if the victim is allergic to Deep Heat.

vt. To masturbate. As a noun, you are a "chugger", and if you are a prolific wanker, you are a "chuggernaut". Derived from the imagined effort and sound effects that go into a wank, which is, honestly, the equivalent of the engine on an ant boat.

Advanced bummer, or, if you will, bum chum third dan.

Gob on your cigarette.
Add powdered flint from your cheap lighter.
Light cigarette.
Voila - crap cigarette sparkler.

The game made famous in TV’s 'Malcolm in the Middle', but an old favourite.
Object of the game is to get the victim to "see" the magic circle, made from your thumb and index finger (in the classic "OK" sign). The magic circle is only "active" when the victim looks directly at it when it is held below waist level.

The victim’s attention is drawn to the magic circle using diversion techniques such as pointing out untied shoelaces, dropping coins etc, anything where one must look below waist level. The magic circle can then be introduced into the victim’s field of vision. When the victim looks directly at the magic circle, you are permitted to punch them on the arm for their gullibility. A pain in the arse to explain, breathtakingly simple in practice.

A futile question designed to test the infinite patience of our Religious Education teacher. He would reply every time with a textbook response - "It is the removal of a small piece of skin from the male sexual organ, or penis." If he had answered without using the phrase "male sexual organ, or penis", he might have been spared the endless repetition. But he did, and he wasn't.

A boy, in need of support and companionship after receiving a prosthetic testicle, tells his 'best friend' about said operation. Within minutes the entire school knows. Within hours his name is 'clacker knackers'. Withing a week, kids are waiting for him to pass by at break times with a couple of Coke cans, clanking them together to match the rhythm of his walk. The bionic bollocked boy flees.

A greatly evil character from the film Robocop, which I was obsessed with at that time of my life. Particular choice Boddicker quotes that we would often use in tedious repetition were: "Can you fly Bobby?" when tripping people up, and "Bitches, leave!" whenever Paul Antell walked into the room.

At my school, the thick fuckers were put in the class ending with the letter E (1E, 2E etcetera. Get it?). These classes were so stupid that teachers didn't even try. We did, however, discover that they liked poetry when we saw pinned to the wall the finest works of 1E. 'Red Rose' 'I have a guinea called rose, his name is rather red'. Abstract or what? This led to us making up reams of similar works to amuse ourselves. Sounds elitist I know but if you can't spell your own name when you're 12 you fucking deserve it.

Classic urban fable, told with very little variation, although in this version the boy is listening to Beethoven's Fifth. Basically,

• Boy decides to have immersive wank, using headphones and closing his eyes.
• Boy masturbates to stringy completion.
• Upon opening his eyes, a steaming cup of tea is next to his bed.
• Boy deduces that mother has watched him wank.

A worse case scenario would be if the child opened his eyes on the vinegar strokes, saw his mother standing there, and having passed the point of no return, ejaculated onto his knee while they both stared at each other. A grubby little punctuation mark, sliding onto the linen.

After one class exercise, we were allowed to decide on the winner of a poster-making competition by judging each other's posters. This was designed to encourage a feeling of interaction, fairness, and "having a say".
What in fact happened was an immediate orgy of bribery, blackmail and violence in an attempt to get full marks. Ahh... organised crime.

An ultra-urgent version of "dog in the playground" was "wasp in the classroom".
As the game was more urgent, you didn't have time to shout "wasp in the classroom". You'd just shoud "Wasp!", and the entire class would jump to their feet, waving rulers around without any real aim, stand on their desks, throw books at the wasps, and ignore the weak child who would squeal that we were "making it angry". Girls would pull at their hair, convinced that it was in there, or hide under their desks to avoid the books and flailing rulers.
It resembled the Muppets' green room, crossed with Airplane's "Don't Panic - PANIC" scene. Only three things could return calm;

1. By an extreme fluke, the wasp is killed.
2. The wasp flies out of the classroom.
3. The teacher sighs and leaves the room.

Stock phrase from a teacher, when confronted by pupils making a mess.
Best met with the reply "yes, they are". Because, after all, they fucking are.

Taking inspiration from a Harvest Festival hymn, the game of Cleave The Sod involved huddling round a victim (the "Sod") and pushing them up against the playground fence while chanting "Cleave The Sod!".

We never considered setting the victim on fire, though. Other than that, it was exactly like The Wicker Man.

The stupidest bloke ever. We told him once that a wasp nest had 50 quid in it, and all he had to do was to shout at it whilst running towards it. Upon reaching it he then had to beat the living wasp out of it. He ended up looking like Russell Harty's cock. Hence the phrase "Don't be such a Clemo"

Many parsimonious mothers make their children items of clothing - the baggy jumper of comedy folklore. Clim's mum went one further and made him a pair of shoes. This wasn't quite as mental as it sounds, as she worked in a shoe factory, but the soles that she took from there were several sizes too big for Clim's feet. Accordingly, all around the uppers was a good inch of sole, and Clim Clofwell's dodgems were born.
Needless to say, Clim hated the shoes with a passion, but they proved to be absolutely indestructible. He left them out in the garden for 2 weeks whilst away on holiday; they went mouldy, but still would not die.

Clim ended up as the victim of a strange man under a bridge in Leicester who looked on whilst Clim was forced to strip, and then put on an enormous pair of white Y-fronts. I'm not sure what part his home-made shoes played in this sordid episode.

Not a proper or acceptable substitute for a lunchbox.

A group is defined as much by those who are outside as inside. When, on the first day of school, Sam and his father pulled up in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, both wearing driving goggles, we all knew where the boundaries were set.

The state of apoplexy of any child called Clive, given enough goading. 4

There is a global game of cock smack going on right now, and if you have a cock, you're playing. To initiate a round of cock smack, you must first warn your target with the phrase "you know the rules - cover your jewels". For obvious reasons, the warning phrase is often shortened to "Yehnehtheruhcuhyuhjuz". Then, smack them in the cock.

Smacks range from the full cock-punch, to the more advanced and surprisingly debilitating bell flick.

A phrase for erection that is so widely considered to be funny amongst me and my friends that I will brook no argument on the matter.

An exclamation that left circulation after the rather obvious homosexual - and pornographical - implications were realised. Curiously, by Mike Cox.

Richard Snape was an unlucky child. He'd been 'blessed' with simian looks and intellect, a name that rhymed with "ape", but neither the brawn nor courage of his hairy counterparts.

Every music lesson was sheer hell for the poor lad; the top three classes of the junior school used to share a weekly music lesson, which involved the deputy head thumping the piano whilst we all sat in rows mumbling to various 'classic' singalongs. The exception to this was "Let's All Go Down The Strand", in which the "HAVE A BANANA" refrain was sung as rousingly as possible with all eyes falling on Richard.

Last time I saw him he was working in a 'budget-conscious' shoe shop.

If you're going to insist on having a war about fish with a country as silly as Iceland, then you could be accused of trying to engineer a real-life Monty Python sketch. But the Icelandic Cod Wars were a real thing, not a whimsical Footlights jape. And the dispute over fishing rights had a very real impact in British schools. Namely, primary school boys would grab each others dicks and scream "COD WARS".

CHI-yuld molestAH!
Code name: Eben-STEIN!
He is the UGliest!
Man you've ever SEEN!
People who have traditional child molesting faces should not become teachers. People who lack the self-awareness to look in the mirror and say "Christ, I don't half look like a paedophile, what with my furtive, sad eyes, sneering lip and pattern baldness" should not be pitied for their treatment at the hands of children.
When the above rhyme fades, simply boybott lessons and sit in your squads, singing;
Gotta be, gotta be,
Domino's... Buffalo Wings

A US term for any mother who decided to have a child later on her life. Particular pleasure should be taken from the fact that the child is more likely to see his mother die long before yours, affording you many years of actual "dead mum" jokes before you have to deal with the trauma yourself.
"How old's ya Mom?"
"48"
"Hahaha, Coffin-Mom"

A simple game in which two gamblers toss 10p coins (pound coins for flash bastards) at the wall. The one which lands closest wins, and keeps both coins.
The blackjack or baccarat of the playground casino, these contests were risky games of skill which had to be held away from the eyes of staff, which is where the illicit smokers would also gather.
This, combined with the fact that it was usually only fairly hard kids who played, meant the whole sleazy scene had the tough, edgy tension of a Scorcese picture.

At one point during the moral and sociological evolution of our class, superiority over others suddenly came down to one thing and one thing only: the girth of your shit. Ludicrous Pythonesque exaggerations flew thick and fast, but Big Dai Morgan's solemn claim that he'd laid one as thick as a Coke can while out camping the previous week was both horrifying and oddly believable.

Paul Colbert's brother was variously in the army, navy, or government, and would get you if you didn't leave him alone.

Daubed on the wall of the gym in 3 foot high letters at some unknown point in the school's history. Whilst being erased (quite soon after appearing, one assumes) the letters were still clearly defined, even from 300m away at the other end of the school field.

Strangely, any camp commandant had left by the time I joined, but house head 'Uncle' Beresford seemed quite willing to fill the role. Canteen food was perhaps the most obvious remnant of this hushed period of the school's history...

Colin was star of an late 70's educational video about and the horrors of kidney failure and the wonders of dialysis. He was a fey child, a girlishly slight frame setting off a girlishly soprano voice. (Blimey - he sounds like antique-hunting pre-teen James Harries... - Log)
Colin's jim-jams were paisley, had flared sleeves and pointed collars. Colin looked away, biting his brave bottom lip as his mother stuck a sharp needle into his arm.
As if this wasn't heart-breaking enough, Colin's chirpy closing speech to the camera distilled into fifteen words what dialysis means to so many; "I love being on my dialysis machine, because then I can eat crisps and pop."

The rallying cry of dedicated onanist Dewy Gibbon, as he attempted to initiate a group wanking session. Dewy Gibbon was - unsurprisingly - the most unpopular and bullied kid in the school.

Come on my face, come on my fucking face. Use the latter if the former doesn't produce results.

In the now well-established "skill = african bum disease" way, if you admitted to coming hard, then you fancied men. I was worried for a good year that when I finally started having sex, then a futuristic spunk cube would plop out of the end of my penis, that my partner would then have to eat.

"How stupid you are" - a phrase inexplicably listed at the back of Tricolore, despite never being used in the book. This happy find made its way into letters, postcards, and essays on pets and family. Miss R tolerantly overlooked this habit, placing a pair of red brackets around the phrase and ignoring it. I like to imagine this perpetuated a belief that randomly insulting a Frenchman is correct and acceptable BUT ONLY INSIDE PARENTHESES.

Just one example of what adolescent sex hair isn't called.

I can't remember if there was a conscious decision to force school epileptic Simon Tyler to have the computer with the flickery screen, but he did the business that afternoon - a shakedown spectacular that made Mr Gratland sweat like fuck because he didn't know shit about first aid.

An intense and moving game for two people. One to stand with their back towards the other, who would recite the following whilst rythmically punching him in the back:

'Mummy's dying, Baby crying
Concentration!
Concentration!
Feel the knife (punch) in your back, feel the blood dripping down (mimicked with fingers)
Concentration!
Concentration!'

This could carry on for up to about half an hour with varying additional verses. By the end your back would be numb and covered in bruises, but more significantly, your soul would be damaged beyond repair.

Dewy Gibbon, the dedicated onanist, ended up in the same class as me at sixth form college. In a unilateral bonding session, he decided to tell me more of his one-man sexploits.
He told me that he enjoyed wanking wearing a condom, as it was 'practice for the real thing'. But you had to be careful, as johnnies didn't always flush away down the loo.
His dad once found one of Dewy's spunk filled rubbers floating in the bog, and to spare his son's blushes, he fished it and put it in the bin.
Unfortunately, Dewy's mum then found it and demanded of her husband an explanation. To save his own skin, Dewy's dad grassed him up and Dewy had to face his parents, and explain that he wasn't having sex, but just poshing it around the house at every possible opportunity.
But it doesn't end there. It should, but it doesn't. Dewy went on to say that we couldn't be sure that he hadn't left floating johnnies in his grandmother's house.
I don't know what's more disturbing;
- an old woman poking at a floating, spunky sheath
- the fact that Dewy, on hearing that he was going to visit his grandmother, had grabbed a condom and said "this calls for a wank!"

A class of 15 year olds were waiting for French. The teacher had a reputation for a certain gayness; hand gestures, vocal lilt, being a French teacher - all conspired to colour him gay.
Gays being fundamentally unreliable, he was late for one lesson, presumably having been distracted by the new handbag shop in town. Five minutes into the lesson he burts through the door, huffing and especially puffing, and pants "Sorry, lads. Cock up my end."

I didn't see David Widden from the age of 8 to 15. When I did see him, I amused myself by following him around and saying his name.
He was fucking bricking it after a while, and the look of confused terror on his squinty-eyed little face still makes me laugh.
I should really get a life and something more interesting to do, but only if David gets some decent eyes first.

Just as we were wondering why there had been no submissions referencing Blighty's favourite break-time competitive game, along comes this nostalgic tale-with-a-twist from Rayner. If any readers over the age of 60 would care to respond, feel free, and send us a picture of you in your school cap and shorts - Conor
Every autumn, we would bombard the local horse-chestnut trees with missiles in order to amass huge collections of the shiny brown nuts. These would then be stored in shoeboxes or biscuit tins until they all grew stinky black mould and our mums threw them out. Conkers would never, ever be played.
I can only assume that conkers were collected because of vaguely-remembered stories from Grandfathers of playground games of yore. In those days, they would sometimes pickle or bake their conkers to harden them.
On the one occasion Conkers was actually played, the vinegar-sodden little fuckers would disintegrate after about three blows.

Connor Hugh was the gayyest boy in the class, so I wrote a song about him. It went;
Connor Hugh,
Connor Hugh,
He loves to put his cock in poo.

Shit but traditional time-waster of a game played with pens, strips of paper and as many people as possible (pointless if played with two, heartbreaking if played alone). The idea was that everyone started off by writing someone's name at the top, folding it over so that the next person couldn't see it, then passing it along. The next person would add a random sentence beginning with the agreed word, usually 'went', 'met' or 'had', occasionally 'shagged' or 'sucked'.

This went on until the strips were full, usually dictated by the thick kid with the huge writing, and the hilarious stories that you'd created were unfolded and read aloud. Most of the time, sadly, they were not the dada-ist flights of whimsy one would expect. They were either total bollocks that either made no sense, or contained endless variations on the same sentence from kids with fuck all imagination, like "went to shag a prostitute!!!" or "had a big shit on the toilet!!!"

William Burroughs did not write Naked Lunch after a game of Consequences.

Aged 8, Ian claimed he caught asthma from me after a particularly bitter game of tag. I did not know, until recently, that asthma is not an contagious disease.
I like to imagine myself, grown up and knowlegeable, retrospectively putting him in his place with an arsenal of words like respiratory, non-communicable, and retrospectively.
As it was, I just apologised for giving him asthma.

Biology teacher, Mrs Bennison gave us this frankly forgettable mnemonic to help us remember the sections of the spinal column: Cervical, Thoracic, Lumbar, Sacral and Coccyx.
Cue a voice from the back of the class providing us with one that was much easier to remember: "Can Tony Lick Susan's Cunt?"

Had a useful double meaning. As well as its common sensical meaning, it also stood for 'crazy on old ladies'.

Not having yet learned words to express the merits of an object/person/pop star, etc, only-six-months-in-London Sabil would exclaim excitedly, "Wow, creeping camels, man!" "Dancing baby baby!" and my all-time favourite, "Play rock and roll and suck it up your cock!"
Somehow, using the words "cool" or "smart" never had the same appeal.

What a schoolmate was said to have joined when he discarded his Game Boy, signed up for driving lessons, and started sneaking off to the pub at night with other cool-gang members instead of meeting the rest of us near the spooky old house around lunchtime on Saturday. Used with the jealous sneer.

Hugh Simms and Michael Torbay were the two coolest guys in our year, but had radically different styles. Simms was a cocky, stocky little cunt with a short fuse and a cruel talent for mimicry. Torbay was more your aesthetic dandy type, enigmatic and aloof.

They were pretty well neck-and-neck in the coolness stakes, until the day in Year 9 that Simms saw Torbay getting ready for a shower after gym, and noticed that instead of grabbing his t-shirt by the collar and dragging it off across his head, Torbay crossed his arms, delicately grabbed the hem of the shirt and lifted it gently up & over in a rolling motion, like a fucking girl.

Once this got around, Simms' #1 Coolest Guy status was undisputed. Not only was Torbay revealed to be a girly undresser, but the deeper implication was that Simms could draw the comparison because he himself had witnessed a girl getting her gear off.

Game set and match, Tor-GAY.

A new student arrived at our school. She was called Asamara, she was from Somalia. Being the only black girl in school, there was endless speculation amongst all the boys as to what her beavoir would look like. One of our number, who claimed to have worldly sophistication, declared that it would be "All pink and orange inside, just like a coral garden." Asmara subsequently became known as "Coral Garden" and invites, (for some inexplicable reason in a southern American Negro accent), of "Come inside my sweet Coral Garden honey!" were constantly thrown at her. Asamara at first used to smile graciously at us - until some other girl told her what we were on about. She stopped smiling, then. I felt bad for years, because I was involved in her being dubbed Coral Garden. Years later I started seeing her on the train on the way to work. She was really friendly, and I thought I was on my way to the garden until she told me she was getting married soon.

1976, when teachers still had coloured tissues pushed up their paisley sleeves. I was 6, and we had a lady come and give us a special talk about musical instruments.
At this juncture i should point out that my mother and father expected blood on my pages and had already crammed as much prehistoric knowledge into my still hardening skull as they could.
Anyway, this woman, probably called Mrs Fuller or something showed us slides of the very first musical instruments, up popped this image and she said, "this is the very first piano" I put up my grubby mitt and said, "actually the first keyboard instument was called a virginals", to which she replied, "Aren't we precocious". I said, "no, merely correct."
For my correctness i was made to sit in the 'entrance hall' at play time for about three days.

The Assembly mantra of our head of year, Mr Farquarson. In a blatant case of not listening to one's own advice he was found dead in his car on a mountain in the Lake District.

Tom MacPhearson was suspended a few days later for finding an exhaust pipe on the school field and asking the Bursar if it was Mr Farquarson's.

A cautionary tale to all those embarking on important modular exams. Upon the announcement of: "Last few seconds, finish what you're writing", DO NOT loudly sing the coundown tune: Do-do do-do dudududoo BOOOOOOO.
This contravenes the pre-specified exam conditions rules, as I was reminded whilst my testpaper was torn to pieces in front of my very eyes.

Sonny Moston was a hard bastard, who, even at the age of nine, would not think twice before ramming your head between the bars of the climbing frame. His particular punishment for me was more simple - an endless labelling of myself as 'gay'.
In a move that still shocks me to this day, I decided that the only way I could end this torture was to 'become gay', thereby somehow negating any further comments. Why call someone gay if everyone knows they are?
I announced my new found sexuality to Sonny by kissing my best mate David on the cheek. David ran away, but Sonny remained. I then 'came on' to him, by approaching him and making 'kissy' noises with my mouth. This was all too much for Sonny. He ran away and cried - and never came near me again.
Interestingly enough, David, my then unwilling partner in gayness is just about to graduate as a fashion designer. Sonny's sexuality remains unknown.

Country Fayre was a house that had been converted into a cob shop. It was run by an immensely fat woman, who was given moral support from the back room by her family. You never saw the family, but the noises they made were unnerving evidence of their existence. It seemed like the fat woman lumbered from room to room collecting the various ingredients, then presented it to you in a white paper bag. The cobs were very nice indeed, but trade suffered from the widely held belief that she buttered the cobs by rubbing them against her armpits.

Victim was approached and asked: 'Would you rather run a mile, jump a stile or eat a country pancake?' Hilarity ensued if the answer was the latter (as it usually was). A country pancake is a cowpat, y'see. Sadly if anybody gave the first or second answer, the riposte was not quite as cutting: 'Er, go on then.'

Secular assembly song. The line "West Virginia, mountain momma" was all too easily changed to "Wet Vagina, mounting momma"

Rural fun based on the cow's inability to move sideways. Generally results in cow being killed. Sometimes, if it's been raining, and if urban myths are true, the child will take a run up, hit the cow, slip through the cow's legs, and get landed on by a freshly tipped cow. Then they both die.
(Rural readers! Have YOU ever tipped a cow? Did you chortle as the cow, its fate sealed, lay helplessly on the ground? Did her big, confused eyes look at you as though to say “this was a horrible accident, right?” Or do you just make it all up to impress gullible city folk? Answers in the usual way…)

9:50am is Cowboy Time. If someone asks you the time, and it is 9:50am, you must tell them that it is Cowboy Time. It's a fair bet that you'll be met with a blank stare, in which case you can launch into the following rendition of the Lone Ranger theme song*
Ten to ten to ten-ten-ten
Ten to ten to ten-ten-ten
Ten to ten to ten-ten-ten
Tennn to ten ten ten
With enough people aware of Cowboy Time, the first lesson of the morning can be turned into a rousing Wild West chorus.
* non-Philistines will of course recognise this as Rossini's William Tell Overture.

In a wild bid to become more popular, the fat kid in our class boasted that he knew everything there was to know about drugs.
One of his many claims was that Crack Cocaine got its name from Duran Duran when they had wild parties and took the drug from naked ladies' front bottoms. This earned him a severe kicking, not because it was a complete lie, but for liking Duran Duran.

Study periods and an unguarded changing room = free time and a place to smoke. Kinda like a male, uncool version of the cool girls in American school toilets.
The one time a teacher walked in, and asked the inevitable question - "What are you doing in here?" - we surprised each other by answering "fixing the toilet, sir" at the same time.
This togetherness must have lent the crap excuse some credibility, as the teacher seemed happy enough. Perhaps he just didn't give a shit.

The Geography department's Scrap Paper box.

Conkers and marbles year after weary year, school crazes were the very bedrock of playground life. For some inexplicable reason, we broke from tradition, and mouth fresheners were the fashion one year. Unfortunately being approximately 9 or 10, it involved a myriad of schoolchildren waltzing into the local chemists and proclaiming they wished to buy some mouth freshener. To which the response would almost always be - "Are you smoking love - give it up, it will kill you one day" not realising none of us smoked but were too embarrassed to admit it.

Works when the tables are arranged in a three-sides-of-a-square formation. While the teacher is out the room, one person is nominated to select desks in or desks out , which is written down and passed around the room once the teacher returns. This may seem fairly pointless, but it adds to the general feeling of naughtniess. Every time the teacher turns his back to write on the board, everyone should move their tables in or out, according to the mandate. Some teachers can be extraordinarily slow to catch on to this, and therefore it can be quite upsetting for them to realise that no-one's been paying attention at all, and have been simply laughing for the last ten minutes.

A game that involved eating a Creme egg faster than your opponent.
The game was short-lived, and effectively ruined in its early rounds, when a competitor managed to somehow empty his mouth in three seconds. There seemed little point in choking ourselves to beat such an admirable and physically impossible record, so we went back to whatever we did before Creme Egg Speed Eating.

A 20 metre square cock and balls motif drawn on the school field in creosote. This killed the grass and meant that the spectacle was visible for an entire school term (and then some). In true crop circle fashion the artwork only made sense if viewed from the top floor of the tower block.

Cribbage is a disease that causes the sufferer to freeze in a comedy pose. If, during a conversation with your friend, his fists raise to his face and press his cheeks into his eyes, it is polite to ask "ooh, nasty cribbage there?", then carry on talking.
It was funny for exactly one and a half days, by which time we'd run out of comedy poses.

Something all children are not in the least adept at. For example writing "Madame Bishop est un cons" on the front of your own French exercise book in really small letters. Didn't have the first idea how I was going to spend the time in all those detentions. Other examples include spending all your mother's change on bubblegum when she knows how much change to expect and you're not allowed to chew bubblegum. And coming back smelling of it. And your mum having a temper like Carrie.

Word that was thrown at me on various occasions because my wheelchair bound Mum has MS. It's not funny, but I'm hoping that those lads, having now grown up and perhaps become fathers themselves, will read this and in a paroxysm of sheer guilt and self-loathing, take their own wretched lives and those of their no doubt equally brain-dead offspring.

The standard, boring sandwich found in an average school packed lunch could be converted into a spectacularly crunchy culinary delight by the deceptively simple act of adding a layer of crisps between the bread and filling. I cannot remember a single instance of anyone not doing this at my infant/junior school.

I recently started doing this again after a break of around twenty years and am at a loss to understand why I ever stopped.

The Smiths Tubes Cannon - Chew up one Smiths Tube until it's good and spitty, then using a second tube like a pea shooter, blow globs of masticated potato at fellow diners.
Sadly, Smiths Tubes are no longer with us, but I'm confident that this will definitely work with Golden Wonder Wheat Crunchies.
The Long Wotsit - Take some Wotsits and nibble a small piece off each end. Using enough saliva, the Wotsits can be pressed together to make a single freakishly long cheesy stick. This will invariably lead to somebody declaring, "that's no Wotsit", in an Alec Guinness voice and then a dinner lady will gasp and faint.

Hitching a ride on a bike clearly designed with only one rider in mind. The compromised lateral stability of the bike, coupled with the fact that the 'passenger' invariably had to stick his legs out miles, invoked mirth and terror as this lurching four-legged monster wobbled between kerb and road. Matthew Blissett, a boy at my primary school was rumoured to have slid off of the seat and onto the wheel and had his scrotum 'eaten' by the mudguard. Naturally, once enough people heard this rumour it was accepted as truth.

Legendary cross-eyed music teacher with no control whatsoever over her pupils, either kind. Chronological age 30, but with white hair brought on by being made to cry, thrown down stairs, shut in cupboards etc. by lower stream classes on a daily basis. In retrospect, hope she wasn't finally driven to mental illness/death.

In Coventry, children were too poor to call it British Bulldog and had to invent their own name for it. 'Crop the wanker' was cheerily shouted across the Coundon area as little children's kneecaps were kicked in by 15 bigger boys.

Hurray! We've snuck British Bulldog in, under the wire. Phil will be FURIOUS!-The other Eds.

Responding to allegations of being left behind during the evolution of teaching methods, our R.E. teacher decided to show us this film during one double period. It details the admirable story of a minister who devoted his life to saving the souls of New York gang members, pimps, hoes and thugs, by spreading the word of God.
Naturally, you would expect some gritty dialogue and scenes of a violent nature. Instead, we were met by a gang who looked like the extras who had been rejected from Michael Jackson's 'Bad' video for not being 'Bad' enough - Coupled with memorable lines such as, "I hear you like Rap. Well two thousand years ago, this cat called Jesus used to rap - About God."
Note to teachers: Hear me up, jive-turkeys. Any attempt to be 'cool' is destined to fail. If you had any concept of coolness, your choice of profession would have been different. You dig?

Gentle art of running about a quarter of the distance you're supposed to by ducking into a graveyard and waiting for the runners to come round again. Under no circumstances should one recommence as the leaders come through, therefore breaking ones personal best by about ten minutes and getting thrust into the school team, only to embarass yourself when trailing in last by a huge margin at an inter-school event.

Our school's zero tolerance policy towards PE kit offenders went too far when Richard Muchamore was forced to complete a cross-country run in his pants. No ten-laps-of-the-school-field for Richard - they sent him out into the world.
Given that the venue for our cross-country runs was the infamous 'cottaging' area of Hampstead Heath, London, the story of a 13 year old boy jogging up and down in a pair of Knight Rider Y-fronts might well have ended more messily than it did.

Back in junior school we were forced to undergo the abject humiliation of cross-stitch. Designed specially for retards, this involved threading shoe-lace sized string through some material which had specially made holes in it, using huge, but annoyingly blunt, knitting needles. Whilst some fun was derived from the fact our intended space shuttle designs turned out like - in all honesty - a big cock, the best was yet to come. The class retard, Lisa Smith, who had sat quietly, intently embroidering, for the best part of an hour finished with a flourish and, standing up to show off her creation, realised, along with the rest of the class, that she had managed to sew the entire thing through her dress. The only thing better than the downright fuckwittedness of this act was the realisation of exactly how much effort it must have taken to force the blunt needle through her dress. One particular bonus was that whilst the teacher spent an hour unpicking every stitch it gave a great opportunity for the more inventive to try putting the needles through each others legs.

A nickname applied to me early on in Grade 7 by a flat-chested girl clearly deluded about her own attractiveness. According to friends, the name derived from the fact that every time I looked at her, I would get a steaming erection, which I would get out and beat off.
Even if I had been inclined to spontaneous public dickwanking, I wouldn't have done it over a girl who looked like a fucking man.

The punishment dealt out to those who deserved it, and equally often to those who didn't. On the workbench where there was a vice in each corner, your victimchild would have a blazer cuff in each of the top two vices and trouser leg in each of the bottom two, leaving him open for various wood and sawdust-centric gags. Chisels presented those playing the Romans with interesting sword-in-the-side opportunities.

The act of taking a classmate's pen / pencil / ruler, going to the toilet and rubbing the object up and down the crack of your arse with unseemly relish, then quietly replacing it. A bonus occurs if the victim thoughtfully puts the crustied item to his mouth.

Crystal was a girl at my primary school who had been kept back a year due to her mental health problems. One lunchtime, Darby Dorass went to the toilet for a piss and came out screaming. We went into the toilets to see that Crystal was standing there having a shit into one of the urinals. Nobody ever used that urinal again.

One who wipes their nose/arse/mouth/whatever on their cuffs to such an extent there is a buildup of crud pretty much to the elbow. Just a tramp, basically.

The process of placing fruit into Adrian Thomas' half empty yogurt pots and anonymously leaving them at the back of someone else's locker for days or even weeks. The Culture's crowning glory came when one fell over in self-styled "hard kid" Scott Cornwell's locker and festering strawberry goo was deposited over his stuff.

In Latin, cum means "with". There was a particular way of constructing a phrase where it took on a different meaning; eg "word" cum "word" cum "word" The middle word, therefore, is in a cum sandwich

Variation on the game fuck (qv), where you have to say "cunt" and get louder and louder. Rarely does the cry get very loud, as the word is so bad. We were all basically a bunch of soft girls, really.

Inform a child how great Clint Eastwood is, and how much he or she loves them. Then make a special Clint Eastwood cap for the child to wear in lessons. This is a rather shonky origami affair with the word Clint written across it.
Be sure to write Clint in big capital letters, with the L and the I meeting at the bottom, though.
C LI NT

Word coined by a boy in my primary school who thought it was the Best Insult Ever because it was a compound of the two Worst Swearwords Ever. He was disabused of this idea when he tried to use it to insult smarter kids, who pointed out that if you thought fucking ladies in the cunt was bad, then you were obviously a big gaylord.

At nine, I wasn't totally sure what this meant, or whether it would get me in trouble if I said it within earshot of a teacher. It did.

Walking cautiously home from school behind some big fat year nines, I overheard one say to the other, "You're a cuntstack!". I gaped, wide-eyed, thinking I had stumbled across an ingenious new insult with hilarious origins. I later found out the bloke was called Kevin Stack, and his mate was therefore merely calling him a cunt, but this didn't stop me using 'cuntstack' at every possible opportunity.

Usually dispensed in the school dinner queue. In order to make a Cup-a-Poop one hand was cupped over the arse crack, so that an SBD could be stealthily emanated.
The warmed and stinking cupped hand would be clenched into a fist to contain the smells. Then opened up over the mouth and nose of any unsuspecting smaller kid along with the shout of Cup-a-Poop! Cup-a-Poop! Cup-a-Poooooooooop! You would rub your hand quite hard in their face, to make sure every last drop went up their nose.
Occasionally you would ask your victim first; 'What is your favourite flavour Cup-a-Poop?' Whatever they answered would be challenged with 'Well I think it's beef' before the Cup-a-Poop was served.

If you hear strange banging noises emanating from a cupboard, and you've recently heard someone talking about a pirate copy of The Exorcist, then you are likely to believe that the cupboard is possessed by the Devil, who for some reason is interested in occupying a space holding hamster feed, balls of wool and eight-year old boxes of tampons for the more 'advanced' girls.
That the noises might be caused by kids in the classroom on the other side of the wall playing Granny's Garden on a computer and kicking the wall out of sheer boredom, would not occur to you. At least, not if you are David Malone.

This led to David asking Reverend Quine (in one of his weekly religious education visits) if he could exorcise the cupboard. Assemblies about offending visiting guests followed, and David wasn't asked to go in the cupboard for wool again.

A fellow pupil became rather green about the gills during a lesson and showed signs of imminent hurling. As there clearly wouldn't be time to get the pupil to the toilets, the teacher had to take emergency action. However, instead of doing something sensible, like grabbing a wastebin and thrusting it towards the pupil, the teacher cupped his hands and allowed the pupil to vomit into them. To this day I'm utterly mystified by sir's motivation for protecting the sanctity of a scuffed classroom floor.

Part of the same family of words as Scunthorpe, crumpet and KT Tunstall, as words you can easily amend to cunt (or kunt).
The best possible scenario is getting a teacher to read out this Dungeon Masteresque riddle - "once you have connected the wire, the cunt should be significantly higher".

John Hunter (known as 'Curtains' for his sad fanny-parting haircut) was the only person in the school who was bullied by everyone. A favourite memory of this criminally annoying nonentity is seeing him, in fifth form aged 16, being chased around by a gang of rogueish first years who are baying for his blood. This is one of those lads who never learns that if you take the piss out of a large group of kids, no matter how old you are, if you're a complete pussy, they're going to beat the living shit out of you. And beat him up they did.