Which, when written on a piece of paper and read out by someone else, sounds quite funny. Technique tried and tested on The Day Today.

Presumably, you're smelling because you've shat yourself at the prospect of me telling. It rhymed.

I'm telling
you're smelling
you went to batman's wedding
you kissed him
you hugged him
and now you really love him
It's shit, but it's got batman in, so it's great.

What you say before you are old enough to know that it's your spasmojesticles (qv) that hurt when you get hit in them. Although being kicked in the willy might make your pipe hot for a bit.

The slightly confused announcement made in Year 8 by my friend Jon after he briefly pretended to shag a chain-link fence.

Another it-selecting rhyme:
'Ib dib dog shit,
Fucking bastard,
Dirty git
... (continue swearing) ...
You are not IT!'
After the third line, the lyrics were variable, and usually consisted of the picker reciting as many other swear words as they could think of until they ran out. The rhyme improved with the age of the rhymer, until eventually the selection process aspect of the rhyme was lost into a purposeless stream of filth.

Readers! What follows is strangely eerie and alarming, but it's impossible to put your finger on why. Judge for yourself.

If you put your bicycle upside down and turned the pedals, it was an ice cream making machine.
You could produce any flavour. Vanilla was popular, as was chocolate.
I still pretend to make ice cream this way as a 41 year old man, with my £1500 racing bike. My wife kindly agrees to collude with this conceit, pretending to consume and enjoy my wares. Even when, after she's finished her cornet, I pretend that it was made with poo (chocolate), wee (vanilla) or period (raspberry). I have even sold her a Neapolitan.

"If you put water in the freezer you get iced water. What do you get if you put ink in the freezer?" "Iced ink" "Yes, you do stink! Ha ha ha!"

A German song, featured in the Deutsch Heute book. Translated literally...

I am hungry, hungry, hungry,
I am hungry, hungry, hungry,
I am hungry, hungry, hungry,
I am thirsty.

Where is the food, food, food
Where is the food, food, food
Where is the food, food, food
Where is the sausage?

Hard to believe any race stereotyping themselves so effectively.

"What do you think this is lad? Some kind of... Idiot Park?"
A rubbish insult, but a wonderful image - Alton Towers for half wits. People queueing the wrong way. People buying do-nuts and hugging them, and suffocating in the plastic ponchos you buy for the water rides.
It still makes me smile 10 years on.

As good a name as any for someone who tries to light a cigarette between his knees.

A Midlands thing I think. Stands for "If Destroyed Still True". When you carve "Dan is gay" into his desk and follow it with this acronym, even if Dan spends 10 minutes scratching it out it is STILL TRUE.
You can also inscribe INDST so even if it is NOT destroyed it is STILL TRUE.
A second IDST can also protect the first IDST, in case someone destroys the IDST first, rendering the actual message destroyable. But that could result in an endless chain of IDSTs, which would be lunacy.

Possibly the funniest joke of all time. BEWARE - if you read this you may die laughing. You approach the unsuspecting victim with the usual 'Knock, Knock', 'Who's there?' 'Idunnop'. Try to keep a straight face as he unwittingly replies 'I done a poo'. Hilarity obviously ensues.

Conclusive proof that our french teacher was a homo: his name - Pete Binns - was an anagram of 'bent penis'.

Outrageous assertion by Andrew Bradley, in response to our constant barrage of crap questions. Suddenly, we began to wonder if he was as clever as he said he was.

See! You can't deny it, CAN you?

There was an emotional conditioning song at school: "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands." If you weren't happy (or were happy, but didn't know it), then technically you shouldn't clap, but if you didn't clap you got told off, so you learned to smile and join in and keep the dark thoughts for the bedroom. Anyway, me and Kevin Smith managed to sing "if you're happy and you know it crap your pants" many times, unnoticed, until it caught on and became the accepted chorus. Then, stiff disciplinary measures were taken.

One of the possible results of pushing a small and hitherto powerless child too far. The results can be positive, or catastrophic; the best case scenario is that the bully will step back, filled with a newfound respect. He will then proceed to befriend or ignore the victim. The worst case scenario is that the bully will simply beat the child up. The shock of the runt sticking up for himself will subside quickly when he is rolling around on the floor, clutching his sorry little bollocks.

Another way of choosing who's 'It'. As well as the more mundane 'Eenie Meenie Minie Mo', there was the one about Inky Pinky Lane, and the my personal favourite, illy dilly dog's willy.
Illy Dilly Dog's Willy
Inside Out
Press A Little Button
And the shit flies... OUT!

The theory that it's possible to avoid being bollocked for misbehaviour if it's so blatant that the teacher will be unable to believe it actually happened, or incapable of responding in a dignified and appropriate manner. For instance, a twenty minute tirade about "stringy chicken dicks" and "this woman, right, gets shagged by a horse" in response to reading Animal Farm (qv) will generally result in a feeble "that's enough now, Paul" Immunity in excess does not extend to those laughing, however, who will be punished with misdirected severity.

"In the jungle, with George and Bungle, and Zippy on the drums, Geoffrey swimmin', with naked wimmen, and showing off his bum..." It's a lovely scene, and an Edinburgh classic.

This was also sung as: In the jungle with Jeffery and Bungle, Zippy bit my foot (ow!) In the jungle with Jeffery and Bungle, Zippy bit my foot (ow!) I limp away, I limp away, I limp away... etc

In Kidderminster, nationally accepted standards for playground terms were circulated, mis-heard, and got wrong. Perhaps we'd heard the right version from some dusty-jacketed, worldly wise band of travelling schoolboys, and not understood their Queen's English.
Take jaffas, the well-known and logical word for boys who shoot blanks. We called them "jaspers". But we also called wasps Jaspers. It was a confusing time for impotent boys and wasps alike.
Similarly, skill - to us - was and American Bum Disease, even though an American Bum is a tramp, and African Bums are just funnier.
The Kidder version of the Rainbow "Lion Sleeps Tonight" song was;
In the Jungle with George and Bungle, Zippy on the drums.
Jeffrey farted, an earthquake started, and down the rocks they fell.
This is self-evidently a bit crap.
Most inaccurate versions of playground games can be traced to a national game of Chinese Whispers - when they passed through Kidderminster, and we got it really wrong.

After coming out as gay to some people, they will sometimes feel the urge, as part of a bonding process and demonstration of acceptance, to confide something back in you. This often consists of "I've thought about it myself", or "I've got a gay mate / brother / hat". One of my flatmates, however, came back with the revelation that he'd slept with his brother, which initially didn't bother me, until he elaborated that they'd done it recently, that his brother was around eight years older than him, that he'd enjoyed it, and that there nothing stopping him from doing it again. I still didn't really mind, as my laissez-faire morality saw that they weren't going to breed monsters, so they're not harming anyone. So, I kept quiet until my flatmate insisted that we should meet each other. Why that would have been appropriate, I cannot guess. Perhaps his brother had been complaining about how he never gets to shag anyone except the family, and fancied a change.
Well, fuck me if he didn't look like Bob Carolgees. My tolerance collapsed - it was all too much for me. Even my slack, slack morality couldn't tolerate shagging Bob Carolgees. I told everyone I knew, and felt immediately better for it. A secret shared is a secret halved - by the time I'd finished, the individual portions of secret were microscopic.
But no less sweet. It's not every day you get to betray a confidence so humiliating.

Using one of those black indelible markers we would get some kid (it worked better on blonde ones) and give him a 'Spanish' or 'Mexican' moustache, glasses, sideburns and, sometimes for good measure, we'd write 'fuck' on one cheek and 'cunt' on the other. If you went over it a couple of times it was almost impossible to erase for days. If the kid already wore glasses a variation was to colour in the lens.