browsing the letter f

When my maths teacher was introducing us to functions, she wrote f(x) on the blackboard and informed us that it was pronounced "f of x". I shared a desk with a boy called Scott, who thought she was telling a letter of the alphabet to "f. off".

He spent the next hour repeating "f of x! f off x!" - experimenting with the delicious phonetic closeness of the two words - and giggling helplessly into his own neck. No-one else laughed at all. We were 14, and most of us were quite accustomed to telling people, things and abstract concepts to fuck off.

Flashers and Proud. An organisation set up by a group of 13 year old girls with the sole purpose of lifting up their skirts or tops at random victims. If anyone complains, they are presented with a FAP membership card and told to 'deal with it'.

Dubious entry, for a dubious practice. We would all go in the boys bathroom at primary school (girls may have practised this... though it seems unliikely). Whoever felt brave would sit on the floor with their back to the wall, hold their breath for 30 seconds, close their eyes, and cross their arms over their chest, while tucking their knees up to their chest. At this point 3 or 4 remaining boys would push his chest (with shoulders, arms) as hard as they could for a 10 seconds or so. Lack of blood (and oxygen) to the brain was the result. Unconsciousness of the individual ensued.

Variants involved using the stone wall in the playground, and an excess of 6 or more people pushing on ones chest. This nameless act was swiftly outlawed, in fear of widespread braindamage. It was none-the-less the best thing we 10 year olds ever did. Apologies if it has been posted under another name. Or if any of the kids from this Nottinghamshire primary school are permanently damaged...

An oft discussed playground myth was that there were men out there with penises so huge that, should they happen to get a full-on boner, they would actually faint due to the redistribution of blood from the other parts of their body. In hindsight this seems unlikely, although I would be interested to hear if it were medically possible. Maybe the purpose was to make the more conventionally endowed feel a bit better about their pathetic maggots.

Not that I have a pathetic maggot. In fact, I do faint because mine's so huge. Don't know why I asked. Case closed.

A girl who sat near me in 11th grade English came into class one day, looking rather sweaty and pale. As the teacher read from Tom Sawyer, this girl began to moan low like a wounded animal. Suddenly, her eyes rolled up into her head, she barked like a seal and then passed out, her face slapping down on the desk in front of her. But as soon her head hit the desk, she let off a fart like a goddamned foghorn. A fart which smelt like death.

Fainting was a brief but common practice amongst 7 year olds in 1979. The would-be fainter and his assistant would stand by the playground wall. The fainter would breathe deeply in and out as fast as he could, whipping up a nice dizzy spell of hyperventilation. After 20 deep breaths, he forces out his final emormous gob of air, and just as he does so the assistant lunged and pressed his chest against the wall as hard as he could. God knows how it works, but the fainter will immediately conk out and collapse, usually falling slightly unconscious and no doubt nearly dying in the process. I've no doubt Michael Hutchence did something similar on his final night alive, only he got his cock out first.

There was a brief craze in the final year of my primary school for mousetrap-type contraptions disguised as chewing gum. When you went to take a piece, a bit of metal snapped down hard on your unsuspecting finger. Hilarious!
At the age of eleven or twelve, my fingers were still quite wee (still are) and it REALLY BLOODY HURT. By the way.

One boring day in the grey and brown surroundings of my secondary education a fake hand appeared. We decided to try it out on one of the brothers (Jesuit in training) and placed it on his chair. He came into the room and did not sit down. He did not look in the direction of his desk or chair for 20 minutes. The tension was electric. When he eventually looked down and saw the hand/part of bloody arm (not particularly well rendered - standard joke-shop fayre) his face went a dead off-white and he squealed "Eeee! What have you little bastards done!" - we were all simultaneously stunned and delighted, expressing it in the only way we knew how... Whooping, hollering and laughing. When our mentor realised what was going on he turned a shade of red which, to my sincere regret, I have not seen anywhere since.

Consequence-free rudeness. Extending the ring finger, or making V-signs with the middle and ring fingers, will cause initial shock and offence, but when it is pointed out which fingers you are using, the parent or teacher will find themselves impotent in the face of your devilish wit. That's how it's supposed to work, at least.

Not a good idea in the presence of others, as they will all invariably start chanting "She fell over!" and push you over again, in a nearby patch of mud where possible. Falling over is an even worse thing to do in the lunch hall, where falling over can result in your lunch being tipped all over the floor and three hundred children laughing at you simultaneously. The headmaster will invariably choose this moment to walk in and randomly give a table of laughing boys detention as you run off crying. (You may recognise the voice of experience in this.)

Playground Australia Special!

A schoolroom version of the game show "Wheel of Fortune", also called "Duster Roulette".

On any hot summer day in Australia, the ceiling fans in each room will be running at the highest possible level. When the teacher leaves the room, a student in the front row dashes to the blackboard, picks up the board duster (which should be one of those big old wooden ones, not these modern foam versions which are, frankly, shit), screams "Fan of Fortune!" and then throws the duster into the fan.

A number of outcomes can occur:
1. The miracle of the duster passing through the fan untouched.
2. The fan smashes the duster in a sideways motion, sending chalk dust all over the room.
3. The fan hits the duster and propels it downwards on to someone's head. Hard.

Naturally, (3) is the best outcome. I still recall with fondness the moment when Patrick Dwyer - the fat-ginger-freckly-twat - got hit by the duster above the eye, splitting his eyebrow and spilling claret. Fantastic.

At the Bungay Town Fete, two kids dressed up as Klansmen and, I shit you absolutely not at all in the slightest, won second prize in the fancy dress contest. They lost to a kid dressed as a womble. The story amuses me so much because the fact that they came second almost suggests that the judges knew what a good Klan outfit looked like, and knew that Cobby and Jaff had missed some important gilding around the cuffs. Or something

The 'fanny banjo' (famously accompanying the willy orchestra) was abbreviated and concatenated to 'fanjo'. Playing 'Air Fanjo' was identical to playing air banjo, but with the strumming hand slightly lower than usual.

An incredible ability discovered by probably the best looking girl ever to grace our High School. She took to performing her talent during assembly, much to the surprise and delight of the remainder of upper school. After a while she appeared to have developed the capability of producing an inward 'sucking' noise to accompany the outward 'farting' noise, the only way I can describe this sublime sound is to have you imagine someone rhythmically thrusting a plunger in and out of a small bucket full of custard. She received such admiration for her expertise that before long several other girls had mysteriously discovered they shared her talent, producing sporadic low pitched squelching noises across the lecture theatre every other day. The final result culminated in daily renditions of the 'Fanny Farting Frog Chorus' that lasted for weeks, causing utter disruption and chaos. Fabulous.

I have since discovered many girls can perform this amazing bodily function, but for some inexplicable reason, don’t.

A liar. As is, "Psst! Wanna buy some fannies?". Unknown origin.

A girl - let's call her TS-B, made the error in secondary school of declaring to everyone that she had shagged Tom Cruise. We told her she was lying, but she wouldn't confess - so it was her own fault that her sexual appetite had a kind of open season declared on it. She started it.

"She put a hamster in her vag face first and it suffocated."

"She put stick insects up her fanny. They all died."

Inevitable first word after walking into any room in a Fonz-style way. Both hands were held out to the side, palms down, to hush the adoring crowds, and a gentle nodding gesture of recognition was made by the protagonist.

At aged 10, I got to first touch a girl's private parts under the table in school. It was very sexy. I was ten, and she pulled down her knickers to her knees under her dress during art class. I used the classic "dropping a pencil" scam, and went under the table.
I am now 32, and I should probably get a new fantasy.
(Uncle Log advises : why not re-enact the fantasy with a current partner or prostitute, then have sex? You might have an erotic version of that thing where you hear half a song and it's stuck in your head until you hear the whole thing. An important footnote to this advice is that the re-enactment should NOT be with a 10 year old girl. Unless she's got lovely tits.)

Example of a hereditary nickname, which curses all members of a family as they progress throughout the school. Began when Farmer Senior, a typical fuckwit, thrashed the rest of the class in the 'farming proficiency' test, getting something like 95%. Farmer Junior smoked vast amounts of gear and, to the best of anyone's knowledge, didn't know which way of a cow was up.

Farrow was a gangly kid who was assuredly mental, and ginger. One of those 'funny' ones.

Allegedly his parents had an obsession with lawnmowers, and had a vast collection. At Christmas a single lawnmower would be decked in fairy lights and placed on the roof of their house.

Towards the end of the year I was phoned by my mate Jon, who barked "You know Farrow? He's DEAD!" before he was inexplicably cut off. I thought it was a joke, obviously, but Farrow really was dead; he had hung himself. That should have been the end of it, but perhaps because of his eccentricity, comedy stylings became applied to his suicide. It became common knowledge, accepted fact that he had "Put the noose round his neck and stood on a chair as a joke, and then he called his friend and said 'come round and see what I've done!', but he accidentally slipped off the chair and really killed himself!" It seems pretty obvious to me that it was a cry for help. I mean, how good a joke would that have been? Friend Enters Room. Farrow: 'Hahahahhaha! Look: I'm standing on a chair, and I have a noose round my neck!'

Then it entered a new stage of ludicrousness. With that touchingly naïve manner that teachers possess, where they assume that kids will be traumatized by a pupil killing themselves - as opposed to, say, finding it funny - our tutor asked for silence so that we could discuss the matter.

"I just wanted to make sure everyone knew what happened, and had the right story." Then, unexpectedly: "Does anyone know the right story?"

Benham, of equally mental and ginger status to Farrow, put up his hand. With deadly sincerity (he was not complex enough to be this deadpan), he said "He was talking to his friend on the phone, when he fell over the balcony and hung himself on the telephone cord."

I looked around. There were no smirks, no raised eyebrows. "I see," said the tutor. "I wanted to make sure everyone was clear on this."

What!? I wanted to stand up and shout "For fuck's sake, he didn't accidentally hang himself with a telephone!" But I started to doubt myself. I still don't know to this day. Maybe he DID accidentally hang himself with the telephone cord. Or maybe people just couldn't accept that a ginger fool would die in a way that wouldn't involve slapstick.

Luckily, later that evening, my spiritualist uncle was on hand to give me some excellent advice: "You must pray to the Great Spirit for your friend-" "He's not my friend!" I never did pray to the Great Spirit, so if Farrow is in Spiritualist Hell I guess it's my fault.

An amusing way to spend a physics class. We all had to sit in the lab on stools that had small cushions on. These cushions were fastened to the stools with elastic, and they could be removed. In a moment of pure genius, one boy farted while sitting down, then got up, picked the cushion off the chair, walked behind the unpopular boy, and held the cushion to his face. This was the birth of the first fart transporting mechanism, and amused everyone for the remainder of the term.

And come on, who hasn't farted onto something and then smelt it out of curiosity?

In lieu of "Whoever smelt it..." debates, the chin defense could be used.
Once the scent of a bumtrump had been smelt then a clenched fist was attached to the chin. The last person to complete this action was identified as the fart culprit.
Of course, normally the first person to perform the chin defense tended to be the person who had farted - well aware of what they had just done and keen to escape the blame - and the loser tended to be anyone who had a bunged up nose or was too absorbed in colouring in the countries of Europe to follow the chinning trend.
This practice also evolved into double chinning, where the second hand should be placed below the first. Ultimately one would look rather like a Pharoah with one of those chin ornaments on - perhaps in his ancient regality a Pharoah was recognised as being incapable of letting off. I'm not sure, we did the Ancient Greeks instead of the Egyptians.

In my early school days we had a quite famous rhyme:
"Winnetou der Weise spricht:
Laute Forze stinken nicht,
aber die leisen,
die um das Arschloch kreisen,
vor ihnen hüte dich,
denn sie stinken fürchterlich"

For the non-german-speaking, here is a rough translation:
"Winnetou the wise says:
Loud farts don't stink,
but beware of the silent ones,
that circle around the arsehole,
for they smell terrible."

Winnetou was a native-american character from the popular cowboy and indian stories written by Karl May.

Back when I was at school - and right up to this very day - there is a rule of begging forgiveness for a flatulent outburst.

Trump - excuse me
Burp - pardon me

I still look at people askance if they get this wrong. Come on - its not fucking difficult.

[log]If you do find it difficult to remember, simply follow this rhyme. "Excuse me poos" (because farts and poos are the solid and gaseous states of faecal matter)and "Pardon your hard-on". For this second phrase, you need to imagine that you have just burped onto a man's erection. If you don't want to imagine burping onto a man's nice erection, try "pardon my lardon", and imagine that you have burped up a bit of bacon into a priest's beard. Actually, this one makes more sense. Forget about the dicks.[/log]

Setting Up : The two combatants would sit beside each other. Behind them would sit the Referee and his assistant.
Duration : A match lasted for a whole lesson. On good days, this can lead to some impressive scorelines and the opening of all windows. Scoring : One goal was awarded for each fart (farts had to be reasonably spaced - a quick follow up was regarded as a celebratory boot into the back of the net).
Fouls : Any 'fake' fart, whether intended or not, resulted in a penalty. A fake fart could be the players chair squeaking on the floor, usually followed by the player dramatically protesting his innocence to the ref, or a sinister 'professional foul' kind of fart, executed by the mouth. Or sometimes, while a striker was 'lining up for a shot' but having difficulty 'choosing his spot', he might unintentionally let out a groan or some other verbal effort. These would all result in a penalty.
Penalties : A penalty was taken by impersonating a fart. Easy, either by cupping the hand under the armpit, which resulted in a bit of a top corner net buster, or issuing a simple verbal 'prrrp' through a rattling, curled top lip, which was more of a simple tap-in, with the keeper going the wrong way.
Coaching : As the final approached unscrupulous 'agents' would try to sell their coaching services, which usually involved little more than them forcing you to get mushy peas with your bag of chips at lunchtime.
Rab Sutherland went on to win this in a tense and pungent final in geography, during which the teacher threatened to abandon the match at several points.

Quite simply, the act of firmly cupping one hand in the bumcleft in synchronitity with a boff, and then rapidly arcing the arm around in an economical sideways/forward/upward motion in order to give direction and purpose to the otherwise diffuse fart-gas. Best directed towards a classmate's face.
With reference to prog-rockers Curved Air who stank and got in your face, or something.

The sixth category of skills on our Career form was headed F. Artistic.

This was the section where we could get the low-down on jobs such as 'trombone imitator', 'baked bean tester', and 'flatulence critic'.

This is true of all ages. In younger years, a finely rounded fart in assembly is absolutely hilarious. No-one can deny this. In later years, when applying for a late licence in the magistrates' court, a similar enhancement occurs. I can promise you.

Holding in a fart can yield great rewards if you release after a key phrase. For instance, after a scene in Star Wars where someone asked someone else to put a trace on a spaceship, I dropped cargo and declared "put a trace on that". Bravo, me.

You won't have to wait long. It's quite easy.

How do you do?
*parp*
Much better now, thanks.

What time is it?
*parp*
Too farty.

Hello!
*parp*
Calm down Jeffrey, he wasn't talking to you.

This last one works best if you're known for having an anus called Jeffrey

The monicker of a child in our year who, ironically, was really boring.
We also made up a character called manij (pronounced manooj) who was entirely fictional and unrelated but just happened to be identical to manoj. Manij died.

Rupert was in the year below, and was quite simply the fattest child aged 15 that anyone in the area had ever seen in their lives. He may as well have had his inhaler strapped to his face while a drip kept the fluids coming.
There are several, but by far the best Rupert story is on a day when everyone in the 5th year had Science in the classrooms that overlooked the school playing fields. The 4th years were doing 100m on an outrageously bumpy stretch of grass, and so as to emphasise their inferiority and fatness in proportion to slender sporty-ish types, the crap fat asthmatic kids were bundled together in the last race.
At that moment the science teacher could have stopped class on the spot and put a porn video on, and everyone in the entire wing would still have been focussed on the sight of Rupert trying to get into the "set" position with the blood from his arse rapidly draining into his head.
As soon as the gun went, the slightly better crap kids shuffled away at relatively laughable speed, but Rupert took an age to even leave the ground. By the time he was upright, it looked like he was beginning to lose his balance.
Incredibly, he started to fall at about the 10m point, and was still falling about 50m further on. Eventually the inevitable happened, and he sprawled in suicidal parachutist fashion onto the grass. Minutes later, as the laughter started to die down, it was noticeable that he wasn't getting up.
15 motionless minutes later, a fucking ambulance arrived to tend to the crumpled mass of boy, and if that wasn't funny enough to everyone, the sight of the ambulance crew not being able to lift him off the floor was enough to convince even our Physics teacher that it genuinely was far more interesting than the fact that water will not fall out of a bucket if you swing it fast enough.
A second ambulance crew arrived, big Rupe was practically given a leg and a wing into the ambulance, and three weeks later everyone in the 5th year stopped laughing.

This consisted of my friend and I linking arms and doing a sort of chorus-line kick while endlessly chanting "We're the Fat Brothers". I don't know why.

Fat Eddie used to get £3 for his dinner. In 1984.

I was fat myself, but luckily I was tall and looked stronger than I was. I mostly escaped taunting on the grounds of my weight - these people didn't.
The funniest fat boy in school's surname was pronounced Weight-Man. It took me a good while to realise that this wasn't a nickname. For his PE option, Weight-Man chose trampolining classes because they involved, potentially, no movement. Sadly, they didn't spare him from mockery, for three good reasons. He had incredibly hairy legs, the sight of him climbing onto the trampoline was a Mr Bean-style masterpiece, and during his turns on the trampoline, his feet never left the elastic. He would just use the initial tension of his climbing onto the trampoline to bob up and down until the teacher (increasingly angrily) told him to get off. This was probably a good thing, as none of us had any intention of trying to catch him if he tried to jump and fell off.
Then there was the ginger, huge one, cursed with the belief that no-one would take the piss out of him if he tried to be the jolly fat man. Trouble was, his jokes created an angry confusion, and a "who does he think he is?" ill-feeling. Went on to get a BSc and MSc, I'm told by an angry reader, although presumably not in Mirth and Merriment.
Finally, we had our year's only proper black girl, so it was a relief to our developing brains that she didn't break the Tom & Jerry Big-Momma stereotype. She always bought in a big pack of sweets. As far as I can recall, I was the only person she ever shared her sweets with, which led to some ridicule on my part, as a potential suitor. At the time, though, I was so careful not to seem racist, and more importantly, not to shy away from girls in case people correctly assumed that I was a fat gay, that I accepted her sweets and sat next to her in a class. Once.

This was a woman of monolithic proportions. Probably around 30 stone, I would guess, even with hindsight. She would waddle around the town with shopping bags full of tucker with which to stuff her ludicrously fat face. The popular legend became unnervingly real, however, when she appeared in our boarding house canteen and started squeezing between the tables. The poor woman had a child of indeterminate sex and age (best guess, female, 12) who was about thirteen stone and could also be seen shuffling up gentle hills.
Fat Momma had her own song.
Fat Momma's coming
She's coming to fuck you
She's so fucking fat
She's coming to fuck you
She's coming up the stairs
She's coming to fuck you
She's got dead sheep coming out of her cunt
She's coming to fuck you
She's coming into the room
She smells soooo bad
And she's pulling the dead sheep out of her cunt
And the tramps and the children (continue, adding awful things, ad infinitum)
out of her cunt
(shouted) She's fucking you!
She's fucking you!
She's fucking you!
She's fucking you!

There was a small Buddhist monastery across the road from my school, and at lunchtime we'd often see groups of monks walking down the street. Most of the monks were lean and lithe, but there was one monk who was, to put it mildly, a right fat bastard.

The monks made sculptures from butter, and it was generally accepted among the students at our school that the other monks only kept Fat Monk around because he would eat the sculptures they fucked up. A friend of mine wrote a haiku about him for English class:

Big fat Buddhist monk
Eats the bad butter sculptures
Human rubbish bin.

The inevitable nickname of short, rotund, gurning English teacher Miss Fitzpatrick.

We had a teacher in our school so fat that when she walked down the corridor, it was difficult to get past her. To ease the stress of one particularly bad episode of fat-teacher induced gridlock, a kid stood behind her, spread his arms out to the size of her arse (in a "I caught a fish and it was this big" manner) and triumphantly held the arse-sized arm stretch high in the air above her head for all to see.

Kids! Did you have a fat teacher? A purulent pedagogue? Tell us all about it - if they didn't want to be laughed at, they shouldn't have eaten all the pies.

Mrs. Fenton (openly nicknamed "Jabba the Slut") was emboldened by the optimism that a bright sunny day can bring. Her mind full of possibilities, she walked out of a two-hour lesson around half-way through, and never returned.

[examples] Two subjects of a perpetually expanding song. The pattern of comedy would follow the Little and Large model, wherein Fatty would fart or do something amusing, and Thinny would either suffer, or not be involved. Thinny never got the laughs, and probably fantasised about Fatty's death in many different ways - if my understanding of murder motives is correct.

When Mark Roberts, a fat child with an extrememly large slaphead, lost his claim to a decent childhood when he was punched in the back in a science lab, and everyone heard the booming noise his hollow bloat made.
Attempts to recreate this biological marvel meant that it would be a rare day which didn't result in Mark acquiring at least half a dozen new bruises.

Nearing pensioning age, Mr. Faulkner's erratic behaviour was excused and explained by other teachers with a roll of their eyes and a long-since-stopped-caring 'It's his last year'. He taught metalwork.
Whereas once we would have to provoke him into sharing his war-time heroics as a parachutist / frogman / desert fox / commando / codebreaker / astro-soldier to avoid working, it eventually dawned on us that he wouldn't give a toss if we just sat there and did our own things for an hour.
After a whole year of learning no metalwork skills at all, and practical assessments looming, a more attentive pupil recalled that we had, at some point, been told to make a trowel. Another child had actually bothered to make one, so those of us who cared about getting a mark dutifully presented this one trowel, in turn, to Mr. Faulkner. He returned the compliment by dutifully giving us all a completely different mark for it.
He also set a written exam which we had no hope of passing but during which I did discover that, apparently, there is a kind of file called a 'bastard' - the only piece of hard metalwork information that I picked up in the whole year. And he probably made that up to take the piss.

Used in Wellington's south-eastern suburbs to describe all aspects of theft. A person who steals something is a feefola, equally when something has been stolen it has been feefola'd. For example "Oh shit, Rangi. My fuckin' pencil case has been feefola'd!" Or "Give that back you Feefola!" For readers not in tune with New Zealand working class speech patterns, feefola is a 'fresh' way of saying 'Thief'.
(Feef and Teef (a contraction of the rhyming slang "tea-leaf" were in common use in Nottingham, as was the more political "tax". Yeah, 'cos tax is just legal theft, yeah? Right, brothers? - Log)

Corruption. The German phrase for "Cheers then" at the end of a formal letter is "Viel Spass". Pronounced Feel Spaz. Ha ha.

By crossing your fingers and yelling Feighknights (sp?) at the top of your voice, you were rendered untouchable in any form of playground mirth. Double feighnights were twice as effective. Rumour has it, soldiers in the second World War used to say it to Nazis when their own shoelace was undone, so they could halt momentarily, tie up their shoes and continue having a war.
If someone wants to fill me in with where this came from or why, feel free to do so, unless it's deathly boring, in which case I don't care.

Sucking your own spunk out of your partner's arse. A mythology grew around this word, thanks mainly to The Mary Whitehouse Experience, and the unwillingness of people who didn't know what it meant to admit it, and making something up. I'm still not entirely sure about it, as in some versions you are allowed to use a straw.

An Irish Republican. To a certain kind of Belfast Protestant there was no worse insult.
Once, a guy who'd just fucked up on a Space Invaders machine was seen thumping it petulantly and shouting "Fenian!" at it.

Mysterious chemical additive included in food to induce postconsumption belching. Fernandron does not appear on any list of ingredients because, of course, the manufacturers are "too scared to admit it".

How to treat women. Find them. Feel them. Finger them. Fuck them. Forget them.
Carrying this idealistic theory into practice may lead to you being disliked by some grumpier women.

As close as one can get to a wank without actually wanking, and therefore becoming a wanker. Wherease being a wanker is a bad thing (unless you boast about doing it over ten times a day, or you can produce over a pint in a single splot), having a fiddle is perfectly acceptable.

French woman whose misadventures in the Tricolore textbooks were entirely unspectacular - except for the fact that her eyes were a pair of tits. Her pupil-nipples (or nippupils) existed, unfeasibly, outside of the eyehole. There were two types of tit-eye in the cartoon:

The amiable, ponderous, motherly dumpling eyes. As tit-eyes, they're potentially worth a quick wank if:

• your genitals have just started shouting at your brain and you can't hear anything else
• you don't mind tits looking at you
• you can imagine a mouth into a belly button without being distracted by the body horror

On the other had, there were the shrewish, upturned tit-eyes that looked like they were desperately trying to avoid seeing a homeless man. It's difficult to imagine sucking a satisfying amount of milk from the pupils of these eyes. Not impossible: just difficult.

A geography teacher at our school, known universally as Fig, was famous for making up the most extraordinary lies, known understandably as 'Figgy Bullshits'. The best Figgy Bullshit ever told involved an epic holiday to the Canadian Rockies, a story which he really did tell to our class. Fig flew from London to Los Angeles and motorbiked up to Canada. The particular bike he took was a fold-up motorbike which folded up so small that it fitted into a suitcase which he kept on his lap as hand luggage during the flight. It was so lightweight that when two trucks overtook him on the freeway, the bike took off in the slipstream and he actually started flying. When he got to Canada, he built a log cabin by himself with his own hands, and then wrestled a grizzly bear that tried to attack him. He also shot an elk.

A big fight at school was planned at lunch between two rivals Lee and John. Once agreed there was no going back and the plan was to wind them up as much as possible so to get the most out of it. On their arrival they walked into a massive huddle who formed a ring for them to perform John Dowbiggin (actual name) started it off with a running kick of which Lee Maltby caught his attacker's leg and, using his shoulder for leverage, threw John in the air. Upon his landing, John let out an enormous, noisy, fart. Lee could not continue the fight for laughing.

"Fight, fight, fight, fight, Two wee monkeys doing a shite." Scottish chant to be sung during fights, or if you see two wee monkeys having a shit, and feel that they are not doing it aggressively enough.

Bog-standard school brutality. Basically, the hardest kids in the fourth year would roam the fourth year rooms in search of likely candidates. Once the victims were selected, they'd be thrown into room D10, and told that they'd get the crap beaten out of them if they didn't fight. Generally, the ensuing violence was so half-hearted that the hard kids got bored and wandered off. One day the victims were Prinder and Garner. These guys knew they were in for a real beating if they didn't satisfy: the hard kids wanted to see blood. The word gets around that this time it's serious. The rest of the fourth year gather around D10, faces pressed to the windows to watch. It takes about 5 minutes for the victims, nearly in tears, to work themselves up to it, and then, driven by pure fear, they start. The whole thing ends with Garner kneeling on Prinder's chest, holding on by the ears and bouncing his head off the floor. For far too long. Fight room never happened again.

A phrase which, as well the well-established meaning of "I found it, it's mine", announces an impending mugging, much like a highwayman command to a coach party to stand and deliver.
Particularly loquacious bullies in the Wild West of Scotland might say "fin', keep: brek beak" which roughly translates to "I'm going to pat you down and if you've lied about not having anything, you get a fucking broken nose".

A practice taken up primarily by my Welsh teacher that annoyed me no end.
He used to do it so frequently that one lesson I vowed to hit myself over the head every time he did it.
That was a painful lesson.

In hindsight I probably should have hit the person next to me when he did it, but he was bigger and harder than me.
Is it just me, or is Patrick he sort of person who gets written about in these pages, rather than the sort of person who writes in? Patrick; your name didn't used to be 'Sears' did it?

A game, devilishly simple to play, but with enormous potential for mischief.

Extend your index finger at the same height as someone's cheek, and get them to turn their head, so that the extended finger connects - sometimes quite sharply - with the cheek. A simple: "what the hell is that?!!" can often be enough to get the intended recipient to look away, whereupon you place The Finger in anticipation of them turning their head back.

If the victim is not feeling jovial, you may find The Finger being countered with The Fist.

An exciting and fun game that's not based on prejudice. Before the start of a lesson you had to nominate a piece of furniture, and formulate a reason for the teacher to leave the class. If, once given the excuse, the teachers leaves the room, then the game begins. The player has to set fire to the nominated piece of furniture, using lighter fluid. Then, they had to wait as long as they dared before extinguishing the flames with a small child's jumper. More often than not smoke would fill the room and the jumper would go up with the furniture, resulting in complete havoc and fire alarms. This one kid just liked getting caught in different positions when the teacher got back. His best by far was standing on her desk pretending to wank over the flaming filing cabinet in order to put it out, needless to say the teacher (an old lady as it happens, english teacher) was so gobsmacked she just didn't know what to say and left the room, she didn't come back after that and we all got ticked off for making her cry.

Spray the tips of your shoes for around twenty seconds with deodorant, light it, and kick random objects about - can and should include attempts at kicking fellow humans.
Very briefly became Fireball - the same principle as above but applied to an old Mitre football instead of one's footwear. Briefly, because people started getting hurt.

Dean Parkinson wasn't very smart. At age 11 he smoked in order to deliberately stunt his growth, because he wanted to be a jockey - that kind of not very smart. One day in Year 7 Chemistry he had a firecracker and his lighter, and was seeing just how close he could get the flame to the wick before it would light. An admirable experiment conducted by a scientific mind, but one with only one final outcome: he did find out how close the flame had to be, and the wick began to spark. Only then did Dean realise that you can't really let off firecrackers in the middle of class without the teacher noticing. In a panic, Dean quickly shoved the cracker inside his school blazer and wrapped his arms across his chest. Three seconds later he was jolting and jumping in his seat, accompanied by a loud fizzing, whooshing noise. After enduring a few seconds of unpleasantness, he opened his blazer and the cracker fizzed and sputtered across the room. The last I remember was a gently smouldering Dean being led away by a rather cranky Chemistry teacher.

Oh, he also once stuck a metal ruler inside the ventilation grid of an overhead projector while the teacher found the next slide. An amazing crunchy clank as the fan ground to a halt, followed by billowing black smoke, and the teacher revised his decision to keep Dean at the front of the room to keep an eye on him.

For children who were spared the New-age horrors of a 'progressive' or 'modern learning' environment at school, the Christian names of teachers were shrouded in taboo and mystery, and their discovery led to the instant humanisition of the teacher, leading to weakness and misery.
One teacher to succumb was a Mrs Judith Clarke. After almost a year of listening to 'Hey Jude, don't make it bad...', we soon evolved into 'Hey Jude begin' (at the start of the class - clever), 'Hey Jude, don't be a gay' (I'm not saying we were funny, just persistent) 'remember to let her under your foreskin', and most poignantly, 'Hey Jude, don't have a spazz'.
Unfortunately one day she did just that, throwing all the books off her desk, and shedding bitter tears, she upped and left to a fanfare of 'naa na na na-na na-na, na-na na-na, hey Judy Judy Jude' still ringing in her ears.
A hard fought victory.

"First the worst, second the best, third the dirty donkey." Dirty donkey also known as Hairy Princess. Obviously sung by people who weren't quite first, and taken unusually seriously by the person who was first, who in theory shouldn't have anything to prove to the person s/he just beat. Also used to punish the third place, who was often rewarded with a beating (or, in toilet related adventures, pissy trousers). The third person, however badly humbled, could take solace in the fact the he wasn't as bad as the person who came first, who was, after all, the worst.

We were told by our Latin teacher that a popular punishment in Roman times was to insert a fish into the rectum head first and pull it out. When pulled out the scales of the fish, which lay one way, would open out and cut the persons arsehole to flapping ribbons - to the extent that they bled to death. Nice. He also told us that a similair thing was done with radishes. When we questioned the realistic punishment value of inserting such an evidently small and friendly vegetable he explained that "radishes were different then, all big and spiny like a pineapple." This caused us to consider whether anything he actually said was true.

The act of voyeuristically viewing - or being viewed - via a small window within a door when confined to a teachers office for some reason.
The specific emotion felt by the exhibit behind the glass often correlated with the events preceeding their quarantine. Acts of malfeasance made one feel pleasingly notorious when regarded. By contrast, emotional outbursts or displays (particularly in response to taunting) engendered in the tank occupant a unique nakedness and vulnerability.
But most pleasingly, from the perspective of the viewer performing the tanking, was the fact that a swift gurn over the teacher's shoulder through the mesh-reinforced glass would light the blue touch-paper on a further outpouring of hysterical belligerence from the 'fishie'.

Ask your victim to hold out their palm.
"There's your house," you say, pointing at the centre of their palm.
"There's the garden," you continue, pointing slightly to the left/right of centre
"Where do you want the fishpond?" you ask.
Your victim will then point somewhere else on their palm, and you, in response, will cough up a massive great greeny, and, with unnerving accuracy, place the "fishpond" at their chosen location.

"Fixtures" was the name of the school diary which every boy was issued with. These would occasionally be lost or left behind, of course, and when you needed to look something up (e.g. dates of sports matches) you would, naturally enough, ask to borrow someone else's. And Freddie Messon-Gilpin would, naturally enough, lend you his in the middle of double biology. And you, sitting behind him, would proceed to draw enormous phalluses, complete with Jap's eye and cum-lines, all over it. If there was time, you could fill in all the space available for each day in the year, and he'd have to buy another one.
(Have you borrowed another person's book and filled in every available gap with cocks, spunk lines and women riding around in tanks with their tits out? We're starting a competition to find the most cock-saturated page of a standard exercise book. Tell Log if you think you've got Britain's most cocks on a page.

Turning on the gas in chemistry and putting a lighter to it. Obvious really. Best time was when Colin Stone lost his carefully combed and hairsprayed, nu-romantic fringe in a puff of foul-smelling smoke.

A highly effective defense against the attack of a trevor's fleas. The castle was constructed from sandwich boxes, "club" biscuits and anything else which could stand unaided as a section of wall. Bananas made excellent flea-cannons which were mounted on the the walls. Drink bottles and thermos flasks made the lookout towers. A small castle could be built around yourself, but the game was more fun when the entire table made a full-on flea castle which completely cut the fleabag off from the rest of us.

Flea darts are basically grass darts which, when looked at closely, sometimes have little black creatures moving about in them. These, of course, are fleas.
Like the purple headed mountain and each little bird that sings, they were invented by God. He designed them to stick to schoolgirls' white socks, who would then walk briskly about a bit on the way home from school before thinking 'Ugh, a flea dart'. They would then remove the flea dart, allowing it to germinate, giving rise to a new flea dart plant.
Flea darts are harvested at the morning break, and distributed into peoples' hair throughout the day. They are generally thrown at girls because they have long hair, or boys with curly hair, to ensure maximum attatchment effectivity.
Once a person has been "infected" with a flea dart, it is best to spend the rest of the day running away from them, as fleas are highly contagious and make a convincing argument that the person is dirty and smells.

A boy called Martin had his life ruined by everyone, but it was OK because he had fleas. He accepted the fact he had fleas with good grace and consented to be dosed with flea powder (chalk dust) during most lessons. One of his brothers was in prison, but this might not be related.

How to tell if you have fleas
- If you smell of alsatian wee and chip fat, you have fleas.
- If you are poor, you probably smell of alsatian wee and chip fat. See above.
- If you bring your lunch to school in a bread bag, or get free school meals, you are probably poor. See above.
- If you sat next to Karen Bachelor in class, you now have fleas.
Note: Having fleas is worse than having nits or AIDS, because even a dirty haired gay would not bum a dog.

Game played after swimming at the local leisure centre during which you would put your towel over your head (like a yashmak), secure it in place by putting your swimming goggles on over it (thereby ‘concealing’ your true identity), and then run around the building shouting ‘The fleeeeeing Araaaaabs!’ until a member of staff got bored enough to tell you to piss off home. The bar was raised considerably when Neil Keouski neglected to wear anything other than the Arabian headdress, ran to the front of the building, and waved his cock at the receptionist.

Spit or the act of spitting, used extensively in Otley, West Yorkshire. Derived from the phlegmatic issue of more bronchial hacking.
fleg pole, a pole around which some students would grab onto and spin around, measuring their worth by the number of times they spin around before touching the floor. These poles, covered in fleg, become dangerously slippery fleg poles.
fleg pit, any lowered area with a balcony from which fleggers may fleg onto the occupants. Those on the balcony may tempt fleggees into the pit with the use of low denomination coins. See also jew bundle.

One of Brian's responses to 'Big Dave' during a verbal disagreement. Dave was three years younger than us but possibly weighed more than all of us put together.
In the same argument, Brian also said, "Your mum's so thick, she got run over by a parked car."

I would like to share this lovely homage to the '70s hit "Seasons in the Sun" Courtesy: Southfields Infant School, Peterborough.

We had joy, we had fun
Flicking bogeys at the sun
But the sun was too hot
And the bogeys turned to snot

The act of fighting whilst in the 'arms retracted inside jackets' official flid position. Often accompanied by Joey Deacon-esque 'Mmmnuurrr' (or 'belm') noises.

Flid flippers is the practice of hiding your elbows inside your shirt, rolling up your sleeves and poking your hands out of the them. The phrase "flid flippers" is funnier than the practice.)

Based on the hilarious thalidomide tragedy, in which pregnant women were prescribed a drug to treat the symptoms of morning sickness. Worked a treat, but it also caused the children to be born with a seemingly random collection of limbs. Easily simulated by pressing your wrists against your shoulders and flapping them like an eager seal. The links are therefore obvious - if you've demonstrated lower than average dexterity, you are a flid, and all your actions amount to nothing but flidding.

'This bloke woke up one morning, and, you know how you sometimes wake up with a bonk on?'

'Yeah'

'Well he did, anyway he decided to have a bath, but he couldn't get rid of it, and you know how your bollocks start to ache if you've had a lob on for a while?'

'Yeah'

'Well, his did, so he decided to have a wank. Anyway he finished but he had a problem cos, well, you know how spunk floats in the bath?'

'Yeah'

'OH MY GOD YOU WANK IN THE BATH YOU MASSIVE BATH WANKER WANKER WANKER WANKER'

Contemporaneous with Garbage Pail Kids, and probably confined to our school. The fluff was a small strip of synthetic felt that lived in a matchbox. Everyone had them, and some of the more adventurous kids made whole cities for these little cloth-strips at home. No one know how this craze started, but it lasted for about a year.

Ask the victim if they want to get high and see amazing colours. They usually say yes, and so the game shall begin. Place the victim (who, it must be said, has to be a very trusting victim) on their knees and hold a towel in front of their face. An accomplice would then pull the towel up while you pushed on either side of their nose with your palms. Once the towel is removed, ask them if they can see the flying colours. Obviously, they don't, so you try again. This time, however, press your arse against the victim's nose and teasingly drag the towel away. It might help if your accomplice presses their face forwards. It would seem a terrible waste to go through all this effort if their nose didn't go up your arse.

An esteemed colleague of mine developed an aptitude for graphic design at an early age. He spent the entirety of the second year drawing dildos with wings in French text books, which we had to find. These were known as Flying Talbots. I believe "Where's Wally" owes substantial royalties.

Every lunchtime, at about 1.10pm, a strange white foam used to emerge from the bottom of the pipes. Children used to play with it - run around the playground with it on their faces in winter pretending to be Father Christmas, or in summer, an ice-cream to fun and fool your friends with.
I now realise that this was the cooks emptying the sinks of all the greasy, fatty, food-encrusted gunk. This, added to a dash of Fairy Liquid, would cause giant clouds of this foul-stinking dirt. Everyone from Hillbrook School will probably get cancer from this by the age of 40.

Fog, The

Book by James Herbert and most peoples first experience of breathing takingly, eye poppingly, gobsmackingly, hardcore pornography. (If you are 11)

Fog, The could be read in public with total impunity, as it’s cover in no way belied the graphic, frank depictions of adult lovemaking that could be found within.

The only problem with Fog, The was Herbert’s use of sex as metaphor. Herbert explores the idea of sex as celebration of life, with death as the great disclosure, revealing the lonliness and horror of life’s seedy underbelly with the literary device of contrast. ("In the midst of life we are in death", and so on.) To demonstrate life’s rich tapestry of light and dark, pleasures and woes, sex is used to throw death into sharp relief, and vice versa.

This means that just as a sex scene was getting to the really filthy bit, the character would chop off their own cock with a pair of gardening shears, or throw themselves into the sea on top of a load of corpses after a big lezzing session.

Most psychosexual dsyfuntions can be attributed to early childhood exposure to Fog, The.

(See also: American Psycho, Judy Blume’s Forever)

Favourite television programme of Mark Foster, who would constantly ask me if I'd seen the most recent episode and then look at me in disbelief when I told him I'd never heard of it. It was about a year before I realised he was talking about "The Fall Guy" which, of course, I watched all the time.

(At the time Mark was receiving regular speech therapy)

The essence of foot chuffers is to stamp on the opponent's foot. To do so is to score a chuff. However, to prevent random stampings, rules were developed regarding a signing on and off process. To sign on, both combatants must raise their right leg and declare the commencement of foot chuffing. You remain in a state of war until one player signs off. Formerly, a mutual and simultaneous signing off was required, in the same fashion of the signing on. However, some warriors would refuse to sign off, and carry on stamping on their opponent's feet for days after, sometimes weeks. After much injustice, the amendment was passed to allow unilateral signings off. Special moves include the reverse chuff, the double chuff, and the total chuff combo (a reverse double chuff). Exotic moves, such as the flip chuff, the uberchuff, and the black spin, were postulated but never put into practice.

Our football burst one breaktime. Someone had the idea of taking out the deflated inner balloon through the burst seam and replacing it with some large stones.
We then 'accidentally' rolled the ball over towards a group of older bastard kids, knowing that they would try to kick it over the fence.
And it worked. Honestly, it worked. One of them took a good run up, had a huge hoof at the ball, shouted out loud, and hopped off on one leg in considerable pain, and probably saying "ooyah!"
I have never since experienced such complete satisfaction at the entirely successful execution of a plan. We strutted around like five little George Peppards for a week.

Everyone experiences a leather football in the face on a winter's day at one point in their school life, but not everyone gets to experience kicking the ball at full force in your history teacher's face on the coldest day of the year, then getting away with it because you can run faster than he can.

For good friends and for good food
We thank you, Lord
Amen
Compulsory prayer said before dinner at my primary school. To be said in a mindless drone, reminiscent of, "Good mor-ning, Mis-sus Jones".
More accurate would have been;
For the wondrous bounty
That is shepherds pie
Left over from last week
And for letting me sit next to Peter
Who smells of cheese biscuits
We thank you, Lord
Amen

It's the late 70's, it's going home time, and Darren is well impressed by the hard kids leaving the school gates with "AVFC" written on their foreheads in marker pen. Darren thinks it's the finest thing he's ever seen, and asks the lads to write "AVFC" on his forehead too. OK, say the hard kids.

Darren walked home that day with "FUCK OFF DAD" written on his forehead.

The first thing you notice about foreign exchange pupils is just how foreign they look. Invariably, their heads were a strange shape, they smelled odd and their clothes ranged from bizarre to hilarious.
Depending on their gullibility and command of English it was occasionally possible to get them to do silly and potentially dangerous things. Most of them were too wise to fall into any trap involving the words fuck, wank, bastard or shit. The skill lay in coming across as trustworthy and in using phrases obscure enough to raise no alarms. We had moderate success with a young French boy who we managed to send into a sweet shop, point to a big jar and say 'clitoris'. The same boy, without any inducement at all, surprised my sister on a cramped car journey by asking if he could come on her legs. She laughed and so did I. My friends decided he wan't a proper French person when he declined the offer of eating a whole raw onion.
On the whole, Germans were more fun becaue it was permissible to punch them for starting wars and gassing people.

A man named after his appearance - that of a muppet Michael Jackson. The most popular Fozzie-related sport was to roll up small bits of paper, dampen them in your mouth and fire them from your Bic biro case like a pea shooter, to get as much paper and other debris into Ferrison's hair without him feeling it. Alternately, you could empty the contents of a hole-punch into his hair like confetti.

The most notable game reached a climax with me losing five to eight. Matches were normally ended like a game of Buck-A-Roo, with Ferrison ruffling his hair and everything dropping out. This time, it ended with a more satisfying finale, when my poor aim led to a wad of damp exercise book entering a non-participant's mouth just as he breathing in.

Jennifer (never Jenny, twat) Campbell looked like a frog. So we made up an entire alphabet in her language, called Fraagian, obviously, and sent secret notes to each other in it. Bizarrely, we never used it to be mean to her or about her. But Niki Earp claimed to be completely fluent in it and even tried to speak it. We fell out in third year...bitch...

Grab another one,
Stick a chainsaw up its bum,
Turn the power on,
Now the fraggle's gone!

I don't know how or why, but the little bloke that used to ride by us on his pale blue motor scooter whilst we walked to school became known as "Frank the Bummer Man". As far as we knew, this meant that he liked rubbing bottoms with young boys. Anyway, this all led to us shouting "Frank the Bummer Man!" at him in very loud voices as he rode by.
One day, this became too much for Frank - if that was indeed his name - and he dismounted very rapidly and gave chase.
We ended up over the clay pits near the school, covered in mud, and eventually turned up for school over an hour late, receiving detentions for our trouble.
After that we left Frank alone as he'd shown us that being a bummer man didn't mean that he couldn't run after us.

Franzi was a cartoon pig in Deutsche Heute textbooks. A few swift swishes of the pen later and suddenly the illustrations showed him in a variety of homosexual/masturbatory acts. Thus he became "Franzi the Gay Pig". Some textbooks just seem to be illustrated in a way that invites scribblings of "ooooh, yeah, fuck my gash" and huge spurting members inserted up farting bumholes.
I wonder, if I went back to my old schools, and asked to see the textbooks, would the same one's I grafittied still be in use? Is it too much to ask? Please Lord...

A weekly process, involving writing 'freak' backwards on the blackboard and then shoving the pre-selected freak onto it. Tragically for Alan Tucker, he was a regular nominee and began to refuse to wear anything but a white shirt to school. His wintry shivering was especially pointless when someone found one of those green "calligraphy" pens that all schools bought in bulk in the early 1980s, and scrawled freak on his shirt in a primitive Times New Roman-style font.

Exclamation of surprise or delight. Also duetted with Elton John on the number one hit "Don't Go Breaking My Arse".

An unusual game that involves any amount of players, but we usually only play with two, because nobody else wants to play. All you have to do is kick the other person's shins / legs. Tactics such as "look over there" *SMACK* are pretty good and the winner is the one who doesn't give up. Bleeding and bruises are good, whereas crying is not.

A pubescent ploy of drawing two eyes on the index finger then passing said finger under hem of tasty geography teacher's skirt while she is stood next to your desk looking the other way. What Freddy 'sees' is transmitted to his master causing him to jolt into eye rolling mouth dribbling fake orgasm. One lad was caught in action, and was sent to the school nurse amid fears of having an eppy.

A book graffiti campaign was launched to free Deidre Rachid - a fictional character wrongly - but fictionally - imprisoned in a (fictitious) jail.

The best one featured a young child praying to god, with the caption "Please sir, free Deidre" crudely inserted in a speech-bubble above his head.

We like to think our little campaign in some way influenced the decision of the Coronation Street writers to release the chicken-necked cunt.

Term of abuse aimed at children of unemployed alcoholic parents living on council estates. At the time (early 70's) there was a kids' adventure serial screened pre-teatime called the Freewheelers. Anybody who was subject to free dinners was henceforth known as a Freemealer.

There was one kid who was accused of hogging the French exchange students. The teachers were informed, a commitee was convened, the kid was reprimanded. The reprimand was stapled into his permanent file. Later, this reprimand kept the exchange-student-hogger out of a prestigious university.
(I'm approving this story because I have no idea what hogging means in this context. To me, hogging means "keeping them all to yourself", and I love the image of this student crowd-surfing everywhere on a sea of fifty frenchmen, saying "allez la-bas!")

Graffiti. Presumably the teacher arrived before the pupil could add the final "r".

This was an event so good, mere words cannot pronounce its greatness. But I'm trying my best to do it justice.

Room 30 was the form room of 10H, and also doubled as Mr Brown's music room. Because of this, there was various musical equipment and other large heavy things to play around with. Some of our favourite games were Put Johnny In The Grand Piano, Drop Johnny Off A Table On His Head, and Pin Johnny In Between The Filing Cabinet And The Wall Then Run Into Him. There was also the fire extinguisher which was put to great use, such as lying it on it's side next to a filing cabinet, then using the upright piano to push in the lever, firing the extinguisher and sending it off spiralling into the room. Great stuff.

However, the highlight of the week was always Friday lunchtime. The curtains would all be drawn and the lights turned out, then all the desks and chairs would be pushed to the edges of the room to create a large space in the centre of the room. Everyone then removed their shoes, jackets and ties, much like in Fight Club, then patiently wait by the edge of the room. Mark Curling would then get behind the grand piano and start playing a long fanfare-type intro. However, no one moved until the proper music kicked in. As we waited for this, the tension and anticipation was electric. Mark would then start playing The Entertainer, at which point EVERYONE in the room ran into the centre of the room and beat the crap out of each other, usually ending in Rowlands getting cut in the facial area (the fat fucker). One particularly memorable moment was when I jumped on Jack, sending us both to the floor, at which point Manji ran across the room and kneed me in the side of the head. Another was when Martin stood on one of the tables at the side of the room and sprayed the CO2 fire extinguisher into the crowd. I seem to remember it tasting like Orange Tango.

Our music teacher Mr. Hotton had a black bushy beard, a thunderous temper and generally looked, sounded and acted like Victorian Dad.

He owned a plimsoll which he dubbed 'Friendly Fred', and inscribed 'FF' on the sole in black magic marker. As he never tired of explaining to us, this was a clever joke because FF in musical notation meant 'very loud', as small boys were apt to be when he beat them about the buttocks with it.

Once, entirely out of character, he gave me a Mars bar for being a good drummer.

An imperfect method of forcing girls into vague sexual acts. Accusing them of frigidity would generally result in a denial, whereupon you would be perfectly within your rights asking them to prove it. If she agreed then you got to feel her ladybumps while she stood as still as she could. Most girls would usually tell you to piss off though.

This was a word we used to describe erect nipples. I think it was short for "frosty nipples", referring to the way that nipples often stiffen when they get cold.
It is also what Maria Westbrook started calling Samantha Dentley after she noticed that Samantha's nipples were almost always erect - a nickname that was never used by anyone else because we were far more interested in making fun of Maria the Nipple Policelesbian.

Get a thin drinking straw from a Calypso packet. Catch a frog. Spawning season is a good time, as they're too busy clambering all over each other to bother about having a thin straw stuck up their anus. Stick the thin straw up the frog's anus. Blow gently. Believe it or not, this inflates the frog, which cannot then deflate.
Added fun : launch the bloated frogs on a pool and try to burst them using marbles launched from Black Widow catapult.

There’s only one thing we hold sacred here on Playground, and that’s TRUTH. (And fags. Fags are important as well.) We believe this entry to be unmitigated bollocks. However if you know different, if you are a zoologist or specialist in frogs anuses, please write in. If you’d like to write in just to go "aaaaaah, an*nym*us u*e* is a vast liar and probably GAY", then that’s all to the good too.

We can’t even guess how you’d go about finding a frogs anus.

Potential urban myth. If you stick a straw up a frog's anus and blow, it will explode. Don't question the physics; it will explode.

Hyperthetical concept of a person naked on all fours, violent diarrhoea and flatulence spitting from their raw anus. A wet, "Aero-like" bubbling build-up starts to form, much like comedy-broken-washing-machines' output only brown and bad. If the person stays still, this shitty foam will harden into a frothcake which can be served in slices. I was old enough to have known better by the time this concept was invented.

When queuing outside classrooms, since one is only allowed to enter when the teacher arrives and gives the OK, there tends to be a certain degree of pushing. Should there be pushing then the pushee may shout 'frot frot frot' or 'frotter' or 'oh goodie, frottage'.

At lunchtime, a banana, a large red grape, a carton of milk and a straw can be combined to fashion a most amusing sculpture, as follows:

1) Cut the tip off the banana.
2) Insert the straw through the cut tip, pointing down along the length of the banana. Push through until the banana is skewered on the straw, with about an inch protruding from the severed banana tip, and at least an inch protruding from somewhere along the length of the banana.
3) Blow down the straw to remove any banana detritus.
4) Cut the grape in half and attach one half this to the cut end of the banana by skewering it on the straw.
5) Take a mouthful of tasty milk. For Christ's sake, don't swallow.
6) Put mouth on non-graped end of straw and blow.
7) Sit back and enjoy your fellow students' hilarity at the sight of this facsimile of an ejaculating penis.
Don't try to be too clever and use oranges or plums for balls. Remember - less is often more, and you don't want to be accused of gilding the lily.

A fat useless bastard. More common nationally than you might expect, this word contains the two Atkinson / Elton letters of comedy, "f" and "b". This explains why the words "baffle" and "boffin" are so popular, and why "Baby Bumfluff" is the most popular children's cartoon of the 1970s.

Can't take credit for the word, I suppose, but the game of fuck is good wholesome fun for two or more players. Best played in a classroom, but it works in the playground too, as long as a teacher is nearby. The first player says 'fuck' very quietly, just so you can hear it. The next player has to say it a little louder, and so on around the players. The loser is the first person to say 'fuck' more quietly than the previous person, to bottle out completely, or to be heard by the teacher.

see fuck shit wanker tit bum

An insult beyond all others. It can be used in a face to face argument, or simply as a curse. It has to be said quickly and with passion to be effective, but you can't help thinking that it would be even more effective if it didn't end with "bum".

Thing I accidentally said when under extreme pressure, faced with gang of big, hard older girls all shouting stuff at me.

Though it was embarrassing at the time, I have since realised, from the books of Roddy Doyle etc. that "Fuck up" is a perfectly valid and pleasing insult, combining Fuck Off, Shut Up, and, as a bonus, expressing the hope that the person it's said to will 'Fuck Up' in their future endeavours. With hindsight, I SO win, you whores.

The sound omitted from Mrs Tulley's mouth when Iain Lenton bit her on the neck in 1986, a year in which he thought he was a vampire.
She shouted 'fuck' quite clearly then added 'shun' on the end in a meaningless attempt to disguise what she said. Rumours went around for six weeks that she was being sent to teach in the Congo.

Despite the relegation of this term to the realms of vulgarity over the course of the twentieth century, it still retains some of the older notions of affection and only faint disdain in some parts of the country. An example;
One : Katrina of Katrina and the Waves fame deserves a big gash on her face.
Two : Why?
One : Because she is such a fucker!
Upon moving to another region of the UK, much hilarity can result from the cultural misunderstandings such a term can cause.

Single use rallying cry employed by Phillip Bales, class spaz, upon being elected to lead the cross country group. When our PE teacher pointed to Bales, he celebrated his inauguration by shouting "Follow me, you Fucker-Mothers!" and then running off down the field. Even the teacher smiled at Bales' inability to get the words Mother and Fucker in the right order.

A rude expression of disbelief at the previous statement. Also the practice of fucking a girl, called Ada, who would be very old and nasty.
A conceivable conversation;
"Where's Peter?"
"Fucking Ada."
"Fucking Ada? Fucking Ada!"

I don't know if dabs exist anywhere else in the world, but in Feniscowles in Blackburn, they were slices of huge baking potato dipped in batter and fried. At 10p each, they were an extremely cheap, tasty and unhealthy meal for a growing child.
Paul H., our school's most prolific and robotic swearer, simply could not order a dab without referring to it as a "fucking dab". In everyday life, some nouns would escape the fucking prefix. But never dabs. Perhaps he just thought dabs was too short a word to make sense on its own - perhaps he just fucking hated the fucking dabs.
Briefly, the school grounds became 'The Place of the Eighteen Fuckings', when Paul H was hit across the back of his legs by his best friend, and managed eighteen uninterrupted fuckings before another word broke the flow. I think this has never been beaten anywhere else in the world.

Robert Watson's eloquent yet practical description of hateful Maths teacher Mr. Pickrell's balding head:

"I give up, it's like talking to a wall."

"Yeah, and this is like talking to a fucking egg."

The sneering bastard was so taken aback he couldn't think of anything to do but turn around and carry on with the lesson, whereupon we resumed the quiet, character-building ritual of taking turns spitting into his briefcase.

An achingly clever responce to anyone saying fucking hell is to reply;
"Why fuck in hell, when there're beds in heaven?"
You may also stab someone with a fork and shout "fork you!". Either way, you deserve a klcking.

As an ardent Derby supporter, James once professed his admiration for their star striker with the phrase "I love fucking Wanchope." His broad midlands dialect led to the bastardisation of the Spanish 'Wan-Chop-Ay' into the simple 'Onechop'.

After weeks of being reminded of this, James threatened to "fucking kill" us with his "fucking gun". Presumably the same gun he used to fuck Onechop.

It was meant to say Buckingham road, but we had tippex. Still makes me laugh when i go past it.
(Been to Manchester? In the hilarious fashion of Terry Pratchett's discworld pub, the Broken Drum / Mended Drum, the sign Canal Street is on a constant cycle of being changed to anal treet and then being fixed by the council, who roll their eyes at the gays, who've "done it again". By the way, I hate Terry Pratchett, don't get me fucking started on Terry Pratchett. - Log)

We loved the film Aliens. In fact we loved it so much we constantly tried to emulate the scene where Bishop the android did that trick with the knife, rapidly sticking it between his fingers.nnUnfortunately, our school workshops didn't have a wide variety of knives, but displaying schoolboy ingenuity we improvised with chisels. Of course we only used very narrow chisels.nnPaul Hopkins, on the other hand (a very large, hairy boy who wasn't allowed to drink orange juice) decided to attempt this death defying feet with a 1 inch chisel instead. With a booming cry of "I can do that!", he promptly slammed the pointy end of the chisel through most of his finger and into the table top, creating a spray of thick blood that reached all the way to the gang of girls at the next table. The wierd thing was, they made more noise than Paul did.nnThis is the same large hairy boy who decided to slap me on the back so hard that I nearly embedded my head in a table. Fortunately, the table was saved by the pencil that I was using (rubber end down) to correct a minor mistake, while the pointy end made contact with the back of my sinuses. Apparently, half an inch more and I would have been in mortal peril. Of course, we all had a good laugh about it the next week when I returned - and Paul affectionately dubbed me "Pencil Face" as a constant reminder of his valiant effort to kill me dead with my own writing implement.nnYou'd think this would be enough, but no... you see, Paul had a new level of dimwittedness hardwired into his brain - some kind of reverse step of evolution, perhaps. Which is why he also managed to hand in his GCSE Design and Technology project in a large plastic folder which he also used to conceal his pornographic magazine collection. Without removing three copies of Razzle, a Fiesta Shaven Havens special, and a rather bizarre magazine called Animal 7 that he claimed he found in a hedge.

The tax levied by my enormous friend Glenn of one fudge bar every day. This tax was only incurred by people who had threatened/bullied me in the past, and thus the taste of Cadbury's fudge remains today the sweet, sweet taste of victory and revenge over Dale Wright.

Reworking of the classic Fudge advert jingle.
A finger of Fudge is just enough
Until it's time to eat
A finger of Fudge is just enough
To give your kids false teeth
It's full of Cadbury's concrete
And very hard to eat...
Wholly innacurate, as a finger of Fudge left in a bag all morning often acquired the soft texture of a freshly laid dog's plop.

Please learn from the mistake I made when I decided to deride a team-mate who had fumbled a very easy pass with Sgt. Hartman's most evocative quote:
"I bet you're the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the Goddamned common courtesy to give him a reach around."
Whilst I basked in the waves of appreciation from my team-mates, the referee (who also happened to be our head of year and best friend of my uncle), heard every word and looked thoroughly shocked. He metered out the most hideous, thoroughy despicable punishment known to man.
He told my mum. Word for word.

(A decent post elevated by a fantastic physics pun. Marvellous.)

Sharpen a graphite pencil at both ends, then clip the power supply connectors to the exposed lead. The graphite core becomes searingly hot - and stays so for ages. Then leave out for the bullying tart who belittled your knowledge of physics as being "swotty" and watch the blisters form on her chubby little fingers when she (as usual) helps herself to your writing tools. Resistors aren't futile!

Fung Chow was a peace-loving Vietnamese village, made out of paper by Nick Ruck. The attention to detail was magnificent - there were little bits of ripped-up paper to represent huts and villagers and everything.
Then the welding-torch helicopters came. Manned by Nick Ruck, who shouted an off-key Ride of the Valkyries, the helicopters left no surviving paper villagers, or huts. Nick Ruck stopped shouting Wagner to scream in a slightly foreign accent.
Mr Ashworth - our metalwork teacher - looked visibly shaken when he arrived at the scene, and may well be the last case of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the Vietnam war.

The alarmingly camp or disturbingly sinister naming of furniture. Camp names, such as Philamena the Filing Cabinet, or Ollie the overhead projector, will lead to sneering disdain. Sinister names, like Fru-Fru the Board Rubber, will generally lead to glances being exchanged and confused shrugs.

A furtive fondle. A form of intimacy popular amongst turtles.

A well-known game where people say fuzzy duck in a circle, until someone says does he?, after which people must say "ducky fuzz". The idea being that you get free swears, most often does he fuck, or fuck he does.
At a certain age, alcohol is added to this game to make it seem less, well, rubbish.

Sorry, it makes it more rubbish. By the time you can get hold of booze, you should be able to say 'fuck' whenever you like. and the illicit thrill goes out the game, so it is just some men saying 'fuck' to each other. Like this website really.