Darren Carrington was fucking loopy, I swear. He used to insist on walking home with me and my mate, even though we both hated him, and would not speak to him all the way home. He would just walk along, listening silently to our conversation, and then leave us when our routes seperated. But this was only the start.
At the age of 14 or 15, he let it be known that he had joined the navy, and his given reason was that he wanted "to go and bomb pakies in Bosnia". Over the next few months we got running updates on his naval exploits - about how he had sworn aboard ship and been fined £10, how he had got angry and punched his captain in the eye, and as a result had had his hat taken away, and to top it all off, his commanding officer let him take HMS Belfast, one of the biggest ships in the fleet, into dock, but he had run it up on a sandbank, and would have to go back the next night to rescue it with a crane.
He would come into class with technical manuals for a Ford Capri, and a bag full of spanners. He laughed like gas coming out of a tap, a horrible whining groan of a laugh. He would say "I don't mind them niggers, but I just can't stand pakies." He was obsessed with Star Trek, but appeared to have never seen it.
He had 4 brothers - Wayne, Dan, Stu and Steve. Wayne was apparently "inside for welding a paki to a lamppost". When we asked him how he had defied the laws of physics by bonding skin and metal with a flame, he said that he hadn't actually bonded them, but had carried the poor fellow, still conscious, up the lamppost, tied a metal bar round him and welded that in place. Strangely enough, we still didn't believe him.

Speaking of Wayne, there was a morbidly fat, pigeon-toed boy in my year called Wayne. His older, bespectacled brother, similarly fat, was called Glenn (like the fat kid off Grange Hill). I can't hear those names now without thinking 'fat'. Did anyone else know any lithe, slim, fit Waynes or Glenns?

I know quite a few fit Waynes, but you're right about the Glenns. Every Glenn I know is short, fat, and wears glasses and roleplays.


For a moment, reading your submission, I thought "Roleplays" were a kind of shoe. Maybe they should be.

All Glenns are short, fat and wear glasses, and all Barry's are immeasurably overweight. Without fail. There are no exceptions, not even exceptions that prove the rule, except Glenn Madeiros and Barry McGuigan, and they're just the exceptions that prove the rule, and probably don't even exist.