browsing the letter l

A text-only adventure. I always got stuck on the bit where you had to cross the river in the bathtub with polygonal holes in it.

Well, an*nym*us u*e*, we can help you there! In the true spirit of Crystal Tips and Alistair, here is the solution to that tricky bathtub teaser! To plug its holes, USE TETRAHEDRON, USE CUBE, USE ICOSAHEDRON, USE OCTAHEDRON, USE DODECAHEDRON. To make yourself light enough, DROP BOTTLE, DROP PHIAL. Then LOOK BATH to traverse the flow. Does anyone else have any problems with 1980's text-only adventures? Have you tried asking Gandalf to carry you?

"Ma ma ma ma ma la bamba
Spaghetti, meatballs,
And a great big banana..."
Spaghetti, of course, refers to pubic hair; meatballs to testicles and 'great big banana' to an implausibly long and curvy penis. Generally accompanied by a bizarre dance, in which said genital features were outlined with the hands.

A comic strip and casette based story in some pre-GCSE textbooks. Also something that should be shouted at someone whilst throwing grass at them/shoving bundles of grass down their jumpers.

Hull notwithstanding, quite possibly the shittest place on Earth. Widely documented in the Tricolore series - Chantal habite a La Rochelle - La Rochelle was a fishing village. Not only it a transparent shithole, it was populated by what appeared to be sex criminals and very hairy women.
"Le boucher qui travail a La Rochelle, il touche les enfants, parce que son épouse ne rase pas ses aisselles."

Does anyone have any lab assistant stories? Ours were really retarded, but never got up to anything genuinely evil. Lab Assistant stories are welcome, so long as they aren't just "our lab assistant used to be really stupid and shuffled around with test tube racks and never said anything." Did anyone ever get into that special lab assistant room? Did they ever touch you? There? In that special place that daddy told you was where Socky The Hand Puppet had dinner? Do you remember Socky's strange, asymmetrical eyes, and looking for the place where he hid until daddy brought him out?

Bending a ladybird book in the middle, and using it as a steering wheel whilst "driving" along the lines of the netball pitch. Most importantly, laughing at the kids doing it when they turn the "wheel" going into a bend, and don't straighten up again afterwards, and thereby should be walking round in a circle. The idiots.

I heard this on the bus today, and a child said it, so I think it counts. Two boys were talking to each other, and the younger one said "I had a ladybird on my hand. I stroked it, and it trumped on me." I laughed out loud, and their father looked disapprovingly at me. I felt like I was in assembly.

"We play the Lambeth way,
Not like you but a bit more gay
And when we have a bit of fun
Oh, boy."

When we gathered around the piano to sing this Broadway hit in primary school, we were specifically warned not to titter at the line containing 'gay'. I wasn't listening, and was therefore surprised to be the only one giggling.

The teacher snapped at me - which was quite unfair, considering that I saw nothing intrinsically funny about the word 'gay' and was only laughing to curry favour with more popular classmates.

Anyway, the song was written by Noel Gay. Draw your own conclusions.

The monster that we had to be during a session of Live Role-Playing.
This involved us waiting for an hour in a damp cave for the bold party of adventurers, being restricted to a naff sideways movement, and having five lads with wooden swords twat you long after your Hit Points had technically disappeared.
Another reason to hate role-playing scum.

The evil glare a teacher would give you after some minor wrongdoing. The more brave the recipient the worse the burn, causing some pupils to fall off their chair screaming "my eyes, I can't see" or suchlike. Pupils can give the teacher laser eyes in return by holding pencils, pens and rulers next to their eyes directed at the teacher until he asks you to "stop being so bloody stupid and put those things down, Christ!"

A very simple game, that we played in French Classes, the last person to sit down after entering the classroom wins. Despite the simplicity, it's quite amusing the lengths we would go to so as not to sit down.

The film 'The Sting' had a great impact on us. If someone arrived 5 minutes late to class, they would fling the door open and announce "Sorry I'm late guys, I was taking a crap" in a terrible American accent.

Note: You can only get away with this in Steve Pack's geography class.

I have been fortunate enough to have had two Latin teachers at secondary school. Both were quite, quite mad, and via extrapolation I have concluded that being clinically insane is a prerequisite for teaching schoolboys the classics.

For my first year I had a fairly old but otherwise physically normal man possessing a fixation on dogs, the British TV show Animal Hospital and classical comedies. He looked startlingly like a non-murderous version of Doctor Shipman.

The other teacher is a wild cross between William Hague, Kelsey Grammer and Steve Ballmer with startling taste in clothes and shirts which compulsively expose his navel. Is easily sucked into prurient discussions, sometimes initiating them himself through use of personal cliches, the most common of which is "As the actress said to the bishop.", frequently appended to any vaguely unusual statement. We keep count of the number of times he says this per lesson. He was once witnessed reading a copy of the Daily Sport and, when wound up, says the word "arse" repeatedly without hesitation.

Particular to second-rate comprehensive schools with delusions of grandeur. We 'shared' a Latin teacher with a grammar school (why she decided to put herself through this ordeal is a mystery to me). Much humour derived from feigning sympathy with her obvious jewish roots. This culminated with one boy's assertion that his father died in a concentration camp, with the teacher's initial empathy then undermined with the revelation that he 'fell off the watchtower'. Suspension and much hilarity ensued. Roman history elements of syllabus also enlivened by repeatedly mispronouncing 'hypocaust' as 'holocaust'.

Laughter is inappropriate both when you are told that your Geography teacher is dead, and also when some rich bitch comes into class in tears because her smack-head aunt had become a cabbage and had her life support turned off. Inappropriate, but irresistible.

You risked this if you put a pencil in your mouth, even for just a split second. If you were stupid enough to even give the end of your pencil a little kiss, everyone would scream "what is wrong with you?" and "do you want to die or something?"

Some people would be so concerned about your well-being that they would punch you. Later, someone pointed out that the pencils were made out of graphite, and not lead. This didn't stop the panic, because graphite poisoning was about ten times worse, you fucking idiot with your crazy deathwish.

[log]If you do succumb to lead poisoning, your blood will turn black in your veins. This is only lethal when the black blood reaches your heart, giving you minutes to run around screaming "I can see it in my arm, I'm going to die".[/log]

The human variety of lead poisoning (popular amongst swans) can most easily be caught from the graphite in pencils. Once you have caught lead poisoning (chemical symbol Pb) from graphite (an allotrope of Carbon, C), you can trace your imminent demise by looking at your veins, which will turn black.
When this black, poisoned blood reaches your heart, you will die. The only way to slow this process down, so that you can run home and tell your parents that you're sorry that the last thing you said to them this morning was "I hate school, and I hate YOU", is by pressing one finger over the poisoned vein, which will temporarily 'pause' your circulatory system.
Once you have made your peace with the world, let go, and accept the inevitable.

Autumn. A junior school in Essex. Three boys in the year above geekily elected not to spend their break times committing unprovoked acts of violence like the rest of us, but instead devoted their energies to collecting all the leaves in the playground, tidying them into a pile in the corner, thereby making a better, leaf-free world for all of us. Cunts.
Of course you could wait until they had a really, really big pile and then try running full pelt into it, kicking leaves everywhere while shouting "A HA HA HA HA HA! WANKERS!".
However, more sophisticated fun awaited us when one day a small shit was spied in the middle of the playground. Fox? Cat? No matter. No-one spoke. We all knew what had to happen.
A leaf was procured and dropped carefully on the shit, obscuring it. "Kristen! Kristen! a leaf for your pile!", a child called to Kristen Barnes. He came over. He picked up the leaf, and the shit with it.
"What?" he said, as our laughs rose and combined in one wall of white noise at his stupid, vacant face, his hand smeared with shit, and his slightly drooling, gaping mouth.

Never the brightest candle on the cake, Gibson only reached legendary status when he climbed an electricity pylon. He was catapulted 50 feet from the pylon, and his IQ was safely relegated to Sunday Stegosaurus League. Our joy was enhanced; not only did it prove his immortality, he came back to us new and improved. He was 'leccy Gibbo.

A form of perversion based on the insertion of a lego flagpole up - of course - the arse. If girls ever did this sort of thing, then maybe there'd be something interesting stuck up the front bumhole, but no. Girls either didn't do this sort of stuff, or don't talk about it, or don't visit my website. Aha - probably the latter. I've only just thought of that.

An unwilling Jack Russell terrier can be coerced into licking ones scrotum by the simple application of lemon curd to ones parts.

A flawless system of truancy detection.
Missing a class would involve its teacher writing your name and details of your crime on a yellow piece of paper.
(Lemon Slips sounded infinitely more menacing than yellow paper, though - both effete and mysterious, you can imagine the shudders running down a gentleman's spine.)
These lemon slips were sent to the school secretary, and they were then inserted in the register each morning.
Registers were then left completely unguarded in every form room for a 15 minute period ahead of registration, every day.
There was very little reported truancy at my school.

A man who would tempt boys with Dime Bars, then grab them around the neck and rub his knuckles into their head. Girls, however, he would grope and try to pull their jumpers up. Which was nice. A load of 5th years let his tyres down once, and he chased them with a baseball bat.

Leo was two years older than me and liked to take amyl nitrate so as to make anal sex easier. After one such session, he managed rather skilfully to curl an enormous turd around the seat of one of the toilets. This was a very traditional boarding school and since I was in the bottom year, as a "fag" I was called upon to remove the offending poo. I was able to do so successfully by using a silver trowel that the Queen Mum had used to lay the foundation stone to one of our school buildings. Eight years later my brother was at the same school and told me about the apocryphal "Legend of Leo's Log" little knowing that (a) it was a true story and that (b) I had been the one who'd had to clean up the foul mess.

Some people (specifically Ceri Govan) may be so amused to find out that sometimes leprosy causes sufferers noses to drop off, that they laugh out loud for a full 15 minutes and are sent to sit on their own at the back of the room for the rest of the year.

The drain in the middle of our playground always used to always have a layer of slimy mud-crust swilling around it.
The dirtiest person in the school was deemed to own this drain - after maintaining this ownership for several weeks, Leslie eventually had the swamp named after her.
If you were pushed into her swamp, then you were forced to marry Leslie. This made you one of Leslie's Lezzies - if you were a girl. Boys just became her regular husband, which made them gay. Because even skiddy boys' bums were cleaner than Leslie's toxic shock factory.

The name of the mythical hairdresser where Miss Harris had her hair cut very short.

Lessebo is a locality and the seat of Lessebo Municipality, Kronoberg County, Sweden. It had 2,623 inhabitants in 2005.
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It's also the name of the IKEA sofa that your mum likes to sit on when she's making out with Sandy Toksvig.

In true Derek Bentley style, the school hooligan did, and instead of handing over the hat cracked my mate Chris's head on the playground.

Another example of highly encourageable simple children. Timmy Long was a special needs kid at our primary school who would, if you chanted "Let's Go Timmy Long!", start to run around the playing field in ever decreasing circles, until he reached a point where he would be spinning in a circle.
As a finale, he'd collapse and have to be taken home.

The female equivalent of bum chums. Apparently, let's be friends sounds just like lesbians. Doesn't it.

A series of GCSE revision books. Owning any book in the series was an admission of being an overenthusiastic gaymosexual bumdoctor.

Kid A : Lezbie friends. Kid B : Homo you don't. There's lots more but I can't remember it.

Logic employed by people who compenstate for their lack of intelligence with a need to be obeyed.
Librarian: You've all got to move, you're blocking the fire door.
Me: But we're the only ones here.
Librarian: But it's dangerous, you're causing an obstruction.
Me: The door is locked anyway!
(I demonstrate by trying the handle)
Librarian : But I have the key in my drawer.
Me: You're only here two days a week! And what if you die in the fire?
Librarian: Just get on with your work and try not to block the door.
Us: Okay...

A lamentable attempt at a catch 22 (qv), clearly thought of in a couple of bored minutes. You were asked "Do you lickadickaday?", to which you would obviously answer no unless you were the most pathetically retarded person in the whole world ever. I guess they thought concatenating all its constituent words would confuse the victim. The result of an affirmative answer is obvious, but if you answered 'no' they'd claim that "lickadickaday" was Latin for breathe. Which failed to be particularly cutting, but it's debatable whether this was because no-one in their right mind would believe this, or because "ha ha, you don't breathe" doesn't really cut it as an insult.

Frank's girlfriend was on life support. She was in a coma for two whole school years, yet somehow sweet Frank stayed faithful.
One day some people asked if they could go and see her. No they couldn't, because she'd died over the summer.

At the age of 5, I was taken out of class and made to wait outside the headmistress's office. While I was there I was told that I had been seen looking into the girls' toilets.

I burst into tears as I stood on a white square on the chequered floor (something we had to do when we'd been naughty, perhaps to highlight our stained souls against the whiteness of tile). A teacher walked up and asked me why I was crying.

"Because I didn't do it!" I said.
"But if you didn't do it, why are you crying?" she replied, stonily.

It was at that moment I realised that the world was fundamentally unfair.

Safety lessons with Mrs Burge in primary school were a riot of incomprehensibility. We learned that if someone touches a live wire their muscles will be paralysed by the force of the electrical current and they won't be able to let go. She got Kevin to pretend to be electrocuted by the lightswitch (eyes rolling, tongue lolling, zzzt! zzzt! noises).

Obviously you can't touch Kevin to push him away from the switch, or zzzt! zzzt! - you're frying too. You need something that won't conduct. Plastic. What's made of plastic? A lunchbox!

Mrs Burge then took my Thundercats lunchbox, complete with Marmite sandwiches, and used it to nudge Kevin away from the switch.

Fucking *weird*.

The sweep of sudden good behaviour that settles over a class when a routine session of pre-teacher misbehaviour goes horribly wrong. Within seconds, everyone will be sat, books turned to the correct pages, in absolute silence.
A good example being when a game of indoor football knocks a cup of full coffee onto the fifth years' coursework.
Time stopped, the camera swept around the football, there was an extreme close-up on a droplet of coffee, and every child lifted into the air, and flew back into their seats.
The teacher, when he arrived, would see two things; the culmination of the fifth years' secondary education rendered useless, and a class of 30 really well behaved twelve year olds.
We thought the two things would pretty much balance out.

Connecting steel rulers across the terminals of the batteries of those lab packs. These rulers were then used as swords, which let off* an impressive flash of voltage whenever they connected.
If anyone's ever connected two 3ft steel poles to the mains and fought with them, I'd love to hear their stories. I never had the balls.
*Hurrr... let off...

If you see a limousine, or indeed any very expensive car, shout "Hi Dad!" at it, implying that your father is the very wealthy person being driven in the limo.

If you're in the company of someone who uses the "Hi Dad!" line, retort with "I didn't know your dad was my dad's driver!"

Assuming, of course, that you don't go to a school where being the offspring of gypnak pikey dolescum is considered fashionable.

The exponent gently draws an exclamation mark on the the victim's spine, reciting "Line, Dot". He then digs his index fingers into the kidneys and twists them violently, creating the desired electric shock effect.
Can backfire if the victim turns around in surprise just as the attacker is doing the electric shock bit, leaving the attacker with his hands on the victim's hips in an awkward and obviously homosexual clinch.

Listen to this,
Too good to miss,
dum dum de dum dum dum
*trump*

If you're lucky enough to have another trump in the tube, or cunning enough to clench mid-toot, then be sure to sing;

Here comes another,
Must be its brother,
dum dum de dum dum dum
*trump*

Timing is essential if you're to pull this off successfully. You must be on beat.

[picture: listen-to-this.png]

This is in E major. Adjust the key to suit the size of your arsehole, and change to a minor key if you think you might shit yourself.

Any member of a Suing Club could threaten to sue someone if they did something you didn't like. A lot of eight year olds believed it when you threatened to sue them, and would even believe that you can get their parents taken away, their house removed, gain custody of all their toys, and force them to live in a cardboard box.

In Kindergarten I had a teacher from the Netherlands. Her main method of punishment consisted of sending the perpetrator to "The Litter Box".
This was a large kitty litter box (large enough for a small child of 6 to fit inside entirely) filled with cat litter and small spoonfuls of peanut butter. You were forced to clean out the tray with a scooper and place the peanut butter "turds" into a baggy. Obviously, the class watching you shuffling little nutty faux-browns around was humiliating, unless you reclaimed control by gently licking the peanut butter, and maybe popping it into your mouth.
Sadly, as this was Kindergarten, no-one thought of that.

One afternoon, after casually discarding a crisp pack on the playground in front of our Dickensian characature of a caretaker, Cyril exploded with "Oi!, I don't wanna see any little reindeer". Unfortunately, Cyril had not been dropping acid as we all had hoped but rather more mundanely hoped not to see any more litter round here - shame.

Living In A Box's eponymous hit. A useful song for when words like gypo and fleabag lose their effect. Can be used in conjunction with "Uptown Slag, she's been living in a paper bag," by Billy Joel.

The unwelcome erection in the changing rooms. Said in a high-pitched squeal with emphasis on the "lob". An erection was treated with the same level of confusion, fear, and disgust as if a lobster had, indeed, walked into the changing rooms with a towel wrapped around its waist, and started whistling.

Looking at the locker in the sports changing rooms one fine day, I remarked that I thought I could just about fit in one if I curled up very small. Someone expressed disbelief, so I smugly clambered into the locker and curled up. Doubting Gitface said it only counted if the door could shut fully, so with a big smile on my face I pulled the door shut. He couldn't believe his luck. Normally locking someone into a locker took several strong men and a couple of bruised or broken limbs; in this case, all he had to do was flick the lock shut and go to lunch. Pride stopped me from trying to attract attention until several minutes after everybody else had left.

In an amazing year of Indiana Jones-esque escapades, my friends and I would booby-trap each others lockers quite freqently using all sorts of house-hold items. Being the top of the top in Science class, which was in the middle of a Mechanical Effeciency unit, I rigged up six cans of whipped cream, two blasting-cap cherry bombs, and a big fake gun with a "Your Gay!" flag that pops out of the front to go off as soon as my buddy opened his locker.

Unfortunately, the cherry bombs blew the binding of the whipping cream cans, sending them flying into the hall. And maybe some of you don't understand how much six cans of whipped cream is.

The name for a child so fat and ungainly that when he falls over, a quick-witted bully has the presence of mind to shout "timber", then pretend that the ground shook.
Technically an insult, should you carry the name into adulthood, you'll be surprised how many people assume you have a gigantic cock. Thanks, that bully!

Tightly knotting the Lord Anthony parka sleeve of the victim, before excreting generously into the chamber you have created. The bell rings, "Atkins" puts on his coat in a hurry to out-pace the bullies...... and hey presto.... log-jam!!

Name of a chocolate bar which appeared briefly in the mid eighties. It was intended to resemble a log with bark-like markings in the chocolate but did in fact bear closer (and thus more amusing) resemblance to a poo. Only more disconcerting than someone eating a Logger and getting chocolate all around their mouth was the Fruit and Nut version of the Logger which was, quite frankly, only one small step away from a Sweetcorn Logger in terms of unappetizing confectionery. The use of the word Logger as a slang term for a turd may or may not have preceded the appearance of this in shops. I forget.

He'd been on holiday for a fortnight. As he entered the school hall, he felt all eyes turn towards him. "He's back", "Look over there!", "Just by the doors" went the whispers across the cavernous expanse. Then the chant started, low at first, but buiding into a cacophony of hurled abuse. "Log-ger, log-ger,log-ger" was shouted as he was chased around the entire school grounds, in tears.
His crime?
The dirty bastard had shat in a urinal.

Irrefutable logic is a supreme irritant for physics teachers - particularly the histrionic shouting type who never actually carry out a threat. Notably, Mr Linton.
Spotting me chatting in the corridor with a friend, who he'd also just chucked out of the class, he shouted 'Alexander, I thought I told you to stand outside the staff room! Why are you in the corridor?'
My response? 'Sir - I'm not standing INSIDE the staff room, and since I AM standing, I can only conclude that I must be standing OUTSIDE the staff room.'
Impressed with my scientific reasoning, he screamed in my face for a few moments before meandering away, muttering threats.

A computer program used in tandem with a small semispherical grey robot called a "walker". Users would enter commands into the computer, and using the magic of technology, the little grey shit would bleep and draw a sqaure on the ground.

The fun, however, usually came with typing in the commands. It only understood simple words such as "move" and "right". Any other instruction would be greeted with "I do not know how to X". Being 7 years old, this was BRILLIANT:

"I do not know how to fart"
"I do not know how to smell"
"I do not know how to boobies"

When a conversation reaches a natural break, suddenly exclaim "Look...!" while pointing enthusiastically. They will naturally turn to look without actually listening to what you're pointing out. Typical examples (I've used with success) include "Look! An arse!" or the slightly cleverer "Look! My finger!"

I was twelve, she was in her thirties, she taught R.E. and we were in a storeroom alone together collecting textbooks. And it wasn't me that said it. So much for Catholic morality.

The lost property office was open some ridiculous hours; Tuesday evenings and for half an hour on Sundays. Therefore, a worthwhile trick to play was to steal someone's blazer, shorts, skidders, or whatever and simply hand it in to lost property. It would be much, much, harder for the owner to reclaim his belongings from lost property than from a more conventional hiding place e.g the top of a bus shelter (next to the single green flash (qv) which was always to be found there) or the Longford River.

At first sight, Louise Elliot is not the most profane name that could be given to a child. Parents with the surname Elliot could generally feel comfortable that naming their baby daughter Louise will leave her safe from ridicule from her peers. It's just ordinary, isn't it?
In the hands of a master japester such as Stephen Foster, however, every single syllable is ripe for scatological sarcasm. And thus your child shall forever be tarred with the monicker Poo Wees Smelly Butt.
I've no idea what Stephen Foster is doing now, but if there's any justice in the world he should be editing books of babies' names to warn parents about just this sort of thing.

Writing tragically poor poetry to a girl you fancied at school would be one way to guarantee five years of bullying. Not having the wit even to do this, one lad at our school sent the object of his affections one of his pubic hairs through the post instead. With love letter attached. Which didn't work, obviously. He's now a policeman. Equally obviously.

A simple mathematical method of working out people's attraction to each other, far simpler and cheaper than all that sodding about with dating profiles like they do nowadays.
If someone wanted to calculate my percentage attraction to, say, Kylie Minogue, they would proceed thus:

1. Write out on a piece of paper:
   Matthew Fasham
   Loves
   Kylie Minogue
   
2. Count up the number of l, o, v, e, and s's in each name as follows:
   1,1,0,3,1
3. Add up the adjacent numbers, pair by pair, to get:
   2,1,3,4
4. Again:
   3,4,7
5. Again:
   7, 11
6. And finally, the percentage that I love Kylie Minogue, 18%.
   This depressingly small percentage, if calculated in a school classroom, would be taken as conclusive proof of gayness.Additionally, as the percentage works both ways, I now know that my hitherto dogged pursuit of Kylie is doomed to a loveless failure.

The unfortunate act of, whilst attempting to create a winning skier, over-estimating the optimum penis angle, resulting in a shower of piss coming down on your own head. The most admired skier practitioners would gain respect by pushing the envelope and coming dangerously close to a Lucozade but still managing to win the competition with dry hair.

The elements of a lunchbox are all subject to a scoring system that any child can appraise in seconds. As adults, we may need help with a table.

	Sandwich	Crisps	Snack	Drink
5	Deep filled, fresh, with two or more meats on wholegrain thick sliced bread.	Rippled or otherwise textured luxury snack.	Proper Chocolate Bar. Mars, Twix.	Can Coke or equivalent
4	Real, unprocessed meats on Mighty White.	Monster Munch or other highly flavoured crisp.	Mid-range chocolate. Penguin.	Carton Ribena
3	Standard cheese or processed ham on standard white bread.	Ready Salted Walkers	Budget chocolate. Ace, Taxi, Blue Riband.	Pouch Capri Sun
2	Elements of sweatiness. Sandwich droops when held by the edge.	10p Red Mill snack - Tangy Toms.	Fun Size Chocolate. Interpretable as an insult.	Tupperware Beaker Robinson's Cordial
1	One Kraft Single between two unbuttered slices of a 7p loaf.	None	Two squares taken from a 500g bar of Dairy Milk. Fruit.	Tap Water

Your score, coupled with your social standing, will determing your treatment. For instance, a score of 12 is recommended for victims; any noticeable variance from the absolute average will result in unwelcome attention. For popular children, the higher the score the better. In a geek-friendly environment, fruit may actually be considered acceptable. To be honest, it's a more complicated issue than this arena allows for, and to be even more honest I'm totally bored with the subject. Bye bye.

After being humiliated in Biology the week before, by having a migraine at the same time as disecting a heart and therefore appearing to go green and spew at the sight of said bodily organ, I was forced into reaffirming my hard man image. This was accomplished by tying several bits of thread to the following week's dissection subject, a windpipe and lungs, and parading it around the class. Whilst the initial ability simply to make it move towards unsuspecting girls at high speed and making them scream was good enough, it got better when said lungs took on a personality of their own. Now totally out of control, Kermit The Lungs (patent pending), began performing dance routines across the benches whilst singing "We're moving right along". The show came to an abrupt halt when Kermit noticed the biology teacher now standing staring and, instantly, reverted to being 'just a pair of lungs' dangling innocently from thread! In a travesty of justice Kermit was allowed to remain whilst I was removed to the confines of the 'quiet room'.

My friend Crystal did a very similar thing with a slit cow's heart, and actually succeeded in making three of her classmates sick. Mostly because the undrained blood would spurt out every time "Mr. Weebles," as he was called, would complete a syllable.

The lurgie corner was the corner right opposite the bin (which once had a wasp nest in it). If you stood on that paving stone, you automatically had the lurgie. Obviously. Even the teachers never went into that corner.

A small Tupperware tub of tomato sauce, in which you may genteely dip your exquisite sausages before gnawing daintily at the end, is both a sign of high civilisation, and rock-solid proof that you have "made it".

An early work from self-styled Tim-Rice-of-the-playground Colin Clifford, about his good friend Colin Black:

Colin Black, Colin Black, Went to Vietnam and back, with a knick knack paddywhack and napalm up his bum, came home mad and killed his mum.

Colin Black didn't go to Vietnam, and remains innocent of matricide.