browsing the letter n

The range of cheap saturday market coats as worn by poor children. Inspired the song 'Nanny Annie Fishy Fanny Condom Fifty-Four'.

We were told a bizzare story from the Bible about Jesus arriving at a city and the children being so happy that the took off all their clothes and threw them at him (so maybe Michael Jackson's messianic posturing fits more snugly with his private life than you might think). People taking their clothes off is more than any group of six-year-olds should be expected to deal with, but Mrs Dodman chose to illustrate this dirty, dirty story with fuzzy-felt style figures with removeable clothes stuck up on a big notice board. Her sensitive treatment of an important moment in the life of our Lord was wrecked by a hall full of children laughing and pointing. The thing is, I can't remember any other Bible stories being dealt with in this way, so it must have been a one-off. Where do you get these things from? Is there an under the counter service at the SPCK bookshop?

Preston's uncle, a keen ichthologist, used to grab Preston, and pin him to the ground, screaming, "NAME 50 FISH! NAME 50 FISH!"
Presumably, Preston was not released until he had named 50 fish. Preston's story should be taken with a grain of salt, however, because he was in special education, and would not have been taught about naming fish.

At a time when 2unlimited shit classic "No Limits" was riding high in the charts, this became a brief insult for the bigger nosed members of the school. In particular, Nathan.
Nose Nose, Nose-Nose
Nose Nose, Nose-Nose
Nose Nose, Your Nose
KNOWS NO LIMITS
(suggested optional extra :
it knows no limits - it reaches the sky,
it flies round the room - and pokes out my eye - Log)

Not that we were racist, or anything, but we had the idea of the Nation of Domination, wherein black people would be put into tubes and forced to drown on their own excrement. Very slowly. We never told that to anyone, and no-one knew what the Nation of Domination was, except a select few. Then came the day that our black friend wanted to join.

If a music teacher is using the National Anthem to illustrate some point or another, it is your duty to the Queen to stand up every time it's played. It's doubly important to do this if the treasonous order is given not to.
If the national anthems of other countries are played, be a part of the global village by standing for those, too. If you are told not to stand to these, say "ar, sir, don't be racist".

Crap looking half red, half blue, credit card style bits of plastic that you received around the time of your sixteenth birthday.

At first these gained much kudos as a mark that you had reached maturity.

That was until 'Pikey Steve' got his, and it was decided that it had been sent by the government as a hint that at least SOMEONE in his family should go and get a fucking job.

My cousin played the innkeeper in his school nativity, and was disappointed to receive relatively few lines. So he improvised. On being asked whether there was any room at the inn, he declared it to be virtually empty, and went on to extol the virtues of his accommodation, including room tariffs.

In Autumn, the hedgerows are full of fat, red rosehips, which can be split open to reveal small, hairy seeds. These seeds can then be shoved down someone's shirt where they will itch like buggery, and cause bright scarlet rashes.
Precociously recounting this fact in a second-year biology class earned me the moniker "Nature Boy" from the indulgent teacher.
This was to be a short-lived glory however, as at the start of the every new school year, I'd be pinned to the ground and covered with rosehip seeds by a snarling mob chanting "NAY-CHUR BUH-MER" at me. When the rosehips ran out, they moved on to conkers.
Autumn is not my favourite season.

A group of about six girls, who claimed to be an "environmental" group and received permission to use the library for our "meetings". We even had a logo, which we drew on our official membership cards and notebooks (crafted from stapled foolscap). In actual fact the name of the club was simply a cover for its real purpose, which was to sit around and write secret-code gossipy messages about Andrea. The club lasted for a week, until the rest of the class found out about the Nature Girls and its crappy name and laughed it out of existence.

The swastika is a potent symbol, massive swastikas made up from chairs in the classroom more so. So we assembled one. It worked, but the culprits hadn't thought about quite how pissed off the Jews might be by this - certainly no-one had considered that they might complain to the head of year. The school, entirely understandably given that about 30% of its pupils were Jewish, took a deeply dim view of neo-Nazism, which taught us an important lesson. Extreme right-wing politics, fascism, and genocide are bad, okay kids?

A cruel show performed by girls, built on the relentless requests by boys for a flash of their knickers. The skirt would be lifted and folded in a carefully calculated fan-formation to the following song;
One, two, three, four,
come on boys and see some more!
Five, six, seven, eight,
Sorry boys you're just too late.
At this point the skirt would be released back to it's full length, just before any part of the knickers had been revealed, leaving the boys to punch their own palms in cartoonish frustration.

A universally popular game at my elementary school.

1. A girl shouts "neener-neener-neener" at a boy and then runs away.
2. The boy chases the girl until he catches up with her.
3. The girl beats the boy up.

If a boy does not give chase, that means he wants to cut straight to the beating. It is considered polite to oblige his unspoken wish.

Surprisingly, boys usually played this game enthusiastically and frequently. It lasted for the entire two years I attended the school, with no reaction but bemusement from the teachers at the sight of five-year-old boys happily being kicked repeatedly by girls until they fell over.

One so dull that their joining a group has a similar effect to a funny, popular person leaving. One such personality went on to become the Lib Dem candidate somewhere in West Lothian in the 1997 General Election.

It is traditional to stamp on a pair of new shoes on sight if they are worn by weaker children. In the case of Ian Lunn, the Headmaster was fair game too.

It was this sort of behaviour that saw Ian in lunchtime detention for three entire years.

It was common practice at my first secondary school for the upper 6th to ask first years "Hello, are you new?". You would invariably think they were extending the hand of friendship and answer "Yes." At this point the 6th former would say "Hello New" and he and all his friends would collapse with laughter. After a few times, when you had wised up you might try replying "No." This was met with the logically baffling "Hello No" and even more laughter, and probably a thump.

I must have attended the only nice person's school in the country. The worst bullying ever that I can remember was that there was a fat girl who didn't get much sun and was rather pale. She also had very pale hair. She was like a self-imposed albino. We used to call her 'Moomim' because she kind of looked like one of those cute hippo-like creatures on TV at the time.
Had she attended one of your schools, she'd have been called 'Albino Cunt Bitch', repeatedly abused to the verge of mass rape, then exposed to some kind of (dog) poo-related activity that you're all so fond of.
Readers! Have you had surgery that has replaced your real memories with birdsong and rainbows? If so, please use this entry to tell us your heartwarming tales of calling fat kids Mr Healthy Appetite, and calling the effeminate kid Captain Diversity. We'd love to hear how idyllic life was for you. - Log

Double French is never a highlight of the week, unless a member of the previous class has left a pair of highly skidmarked girl’s underpants on the floor.
The true culprit was never discovered but kids need a victim, and that victim was Sylvia. As punishment she was shut in a classroom as we banged on the windows singing “Nicholas” (knicker-less, geddit?) and threw our (clean) gym knickers at the window.

To develop an erection whilst bouncing on a trampoline. The poor bastard never lived it down.

Nick was a goofy, scruffy kid who transferred in to our school in the second year. He was forever kicking a tennis ball around the plaground, and his shoes were a regular casualty.
Eventually, his mom got fed up of buying him new ones and told him to glue the soles back together on the old ones and give them a good polish.
Polishing was easy; but no glue was to be had at Nick's place and, not being arsed to head up to the local shopping center, Nick found a nail and nailed his sole back on. The fact that it was a 1-inch nail - thoughtfully whacked right through the middle of the sole so he would only need one - didn't become an issue until the next morning, when he discovered that walking on it caused the nail to repeatedly pierce his foot. Quite deeply, too, much to our amusement.
It was still fairly amusing two weeks later when it went septic.

We had all been told that we had to be careful around Nigel. He wasn't allowed to eat chocolate, or drink delicious fizzy pops. Earwax was OK - he'd shovel that stuff straight in. He didn't eat bogeys, though - he stored those in his pencil case.

One morning our teacher walked in ashen faced and quietly explained that Nigel would not be coming to school any more. He had moved a long way away.

Our bewildered but trauma-free response clearly wasn't enough for her, as she let out the cry "Nigel is DEAD!".

Unable to process this early brush with mortality as a tragedy, we'd simply echo her heartfelt outburst in the playground, to punctuate a wide range of antics. In some cases, this would continue well into our twenties.

Nigel is still dead.

Nimin made his mark on the first day of school by throwing a stone at a seagull, breaking its wing and sending it spiralling to Earth. It's the kind of achievement you should save for the last day of the fifth year - young minds are not ready for the celebrity status gained from crippling a seagull.
Poor Nimin knew he could never surpass this feat, and fell in with a bad crowd. With his new friend, a boy who was left with metal / no teeth after a rugby accident, he soon resorted to snorting Coffee-Mate through biro casings.
People would walk past the table at which Nimin and his bond-villain friend would sit, snorting and regurgitating Coffee-Mate.
"Who's that?" one boy would ask.
"That's Nimin," another boy would reply. "And a boy with no / metal teeth."
"Nimin? The guy who crippled a Seagull?"
"That Nimin died long ago. Just keep walking."

A statistic which tore through the school at an alarming rate, representing the average volume of saliva present in the final dregs of a drink. It was the unusual precision of the number which led to its universal acceptance. A natural logical leap stipulated that any drink which was under half full was up to 97% owner spittle. Only the first sip was safe if you didn't want to French Kiss all the previous sippers.
If you wanted to upgrade the statistic yourself, you could do so by saying "they've just found out..." before giving your new figures.

An exciting name for something rather lame. Two 2p coins wrapped in rolls of paper caps and sellotape, which was thrown at any hard surface to cause a moderately loud bang. The use of these primitive pyrotechnics eventually led to the exciting games of "Spray the aerosol can at the flaming pile of lavatory paper" and in my case "Use the air bomb to explode giant size lemons in Fung Tang's back garden".

A playful, yet painful, pinch and twist motion on the nipple. aka tit-nip.

Amusing extension of the nipple gripple that often got out of hand. On a quiet and rainy lunchtime one boy (usually school delinquant Oliver) would nipple cripple another boy until they gave up and agreed to join the patrol. They would then go and find another boy and nipple gripple him until he also "joined the patrol". This would go on until there was a stupidly large group of boys (often more than thirty) and new boys were becoming increasingly difficult to find. Girls were obviously taboo, because we thought their nipples might come off, and bottles of milk would fall out. We usually stopped when the group was so large that we actually made some poor youth's nipples bleed. Which invariably happened.

Desperate pleas that "nits only live in really clean hair" will never be believed. The nurse only told you that to make you feel better. In reality, you even revolted the nurse.

No one is quite sure what privileges are gained from membership of Nixon's Sex Club - but the way to join is simple. You just have to have had sex, with a girl.

Nixon's Sex Club has a pretty impressive membership roster, considering that Nixon - and everyone in his club - were eight years old.

The unfortunately named Noel Licence was born to be given stick. In the middle of any activity whatsoever, someone would stop him, and say "you've got Noel Licence to do that".

• 1st Year : Good-natured laughing along.
• 2nd Year : Laughter stopped, joke wearily acknowledged with eyes rolled.
• 3rd Year : Signs of frustration started appearing, some sarcastic laughter.
• 4th Year : Verbal retaliations favoured over faux-laughter.
• 5th Year : Physical development finally allowed for frequent violent reactions.

It was the ever-changing reactions which kept the game going - that and the fact he was fat and useless.

During some extra-curricular activities in summer time, all primary school students were required to come to class wearing a T-shirt bearing some sort of popular character. Why? I forget.
Most people wore a Loadsamoney T-shirt or a Fido Dido T-shirt or some such, but I - coming from the most socially repressed family in South East Anglia - didn't have any t-shirts with 'popular characters' on.
After at least half an hour digging through various closets, we found the closest thing possible - a T-shirt bearing a picture of the Halifax Building Society Cat.
While I like to think I was championing the cause of Naomi Klein's seminal book 'No Logo', I was actually championing the cause of low rate mortgages with 17.9% APR.

This taunt can be used against a teacher in the following circumstances;
a) You are in a school which teaches Classics.
b) Your classics teacher has recently crashed the school minibus.
c) Part of your lesson involves delining Latin verbs on the blackboard. In particular nomen, the final form of which is nominibus.
Oh, fuck it. This isn't really worth it.

For some reason, this is a very funny thing to say when you and your friends are on acid, and logic slips vaguely back into place for a moment. This isn't a playground thing, it's just something I wanted to share. If it encourages children to take acid, all the better. Anybody got any spare acid?

Misunderstanding the concept of No Uniform Day, Graham McKillop arrived at school in a Lemming costume, complete with green hair. Good publicity for Psygnosis; bad, BAD publicity for Graham McKillop.

An all-purpose phrase, as long as the purpose is to stop Richard talking, responding to an insult, kicking a ball, sitting near you, or otherwise having any dealings with the world around him.
Best said in an exhausted and really loud voice, so everyone turns around to see what it was that Richard was trying this time.
After some months of such training, Richard will automatically not try it, and require only a raised finger and eyebrow to shut him up, if a look of hopeful interaction flickers across his face, or any sounds start to come out of his mouth.

We had a history teacher who wrote copious notes on the blackboard. It became a test of courage to wait until he was in the middle of writing and stand up and whip out your knob. Whoever dared to leave it out the longest, risking him turning around and catching you, was the Knob-King of the week. Once, a particularly unpopular boy, trying to ingratiate himself with the in-crowd, whipped out his knob during the lesson and the boy behind him yanked his trousers and pants down and shouted 'KNOB!' Of course, the teacher turned around and caught him. He was sent home and his parents had to come in and see the headmaster.

A thick and glutinous ejaculation, which is slightly yellow in colour, and alcoholic. Coined after an English lesson demonstration of how to make Egg-Nog, which was all very exciting because we had booze in the classroom. We were allowed to have tiny sips and pretend to be drunk.

Nobby Hall is a standard bus song, sung to the tune of "If you're happy and you know it...".
His name was Nobby Hall, Nobby Hall,
His name was Nobby Hall, Nobby Hall,
His name was Nobby Hall, and he only had one... fiiiing-EEER!
His name was Nobby Hall, Nobby Hall.
Now you've got the general idea, we can mercifully whip through the other verses.

• He went to rob a bank, and he stopped to have a sandwich.
• The police began a hunt, and they caught the stupid man.
• The police caught him quick, and they caught him by his elbow.
• The judge's name was Annie, and she had a hairy head.
• The lawyer's name was Chuck, and he was a lousy rascal.
• They sent him off to Venus, and he landed on his head.
• He landed in a pit, and the pit was full of moss.

After which, if you're all still singing, you can round off with the first verse.
There are two ways of spicing it up. The first version, for wet ladies, include singing with the proper sweary words in, but very quietly, so that everyone goes "tee hee". For the bolder performers, you can sing the whole thing "inverted". An inverted verse would go;
She had a hairy fanny, hairy fanny,
She had a hairy fanny, hairy fanny,
She had a hairy fanny,
and the judge's name was... Annie,
She had a hairy fanny, hairy fanny.
It's important to keep the pause, as though you are going to say something rude, but don't. Just like the original.
This version would drop the jaws of younger children, which is what it's all about, really.

A non-alcoholic attack where you punch your victim from both sides, in either kidney.

We had a G.C.S.E. Physics teacher called Mr Fennell. He was an arse to begin with, but any teacher whose first name is Norman deserves everything he gets.nnNorm used to have whole lists of sayings, like when he demonstrated action and reaction using a trolley on a spring he would pull the spring tight saying "I'm no fool, I've played this game before". Or when holding a hot jar, "Ooh, Mucho Hotto". Bad enough as it stands, but only augmented by the fact that he was an inveterate pipe smoker, and would always, without fail, set us some crappy task and disappear across the corridor to the Prep Room to have a quick puff.nnThis led our hardy little band of Physicists to form the "Happy Norm Appreciation Society", so called because he was a miserable fucker whom we all hated. Such papers existed within the society as 'Teaching from the Prep Room', 'The Role of the Pipe in Teaching' and 'Why am I such a twat, my name is Norm' Hit songs included Aspects of Norm, The Phantom of the Opera's Lighting System, CapAciTorS and the list goes on.nnYes, we were sad, but my God the look on his face on our last day when we presented him with the collected papers of The Normers was worth every pubescent moment. And all this informed my own short lived teaching career in Manchester: I decided maybe I wasn't quite in the right mould when one lunchtime I discovered I had the same nicknames for my colleagues as the kids did.nnLike Mr Henderson, who is bald. Clearly, Hendyslap. No question. This is the same Hendyslap who strode into the main staff room, irritated by the mess of coffee granules on the side, proclaiming, "Would the member of staff who has Palsy please refrain from making coffee". Oops.

Norman McCaig was a scottish poet who so impressed us with his poetry and name that we rechristened him Nurmin MacQuaggey and recorded his adventures in cartoon form as the Norman McCaig Saga.
This three-part epic featured Norman meeting someone and saying "I am the poet McCaig", before receiving pieces of sage advice.
His three oracles were a man with a large hammer, Yoda and the Jewish Cheese Man. Jewish Cheese Man regularly appeared in our workbook defacing, and had a book of Norman's poetry hidden in his large cossack-style hat.

After playing "speednob" on your exercise book, one method of correction was making them look like Norman soldiers. This is done by extending the 'jap line' down beyond the 'head line', making the nose guard of the Normal helmet, and adding a face. Additional realism could be achieved by adding a little arm holding a spear or sword, and shield.

Onomatopoeic; a blow job. Funnier since Ikea took it up as an advertising slogan. Incidentally, the only real naughtiness in the IKEA catalogue is the RIMMA guest towel.

A sensetive - if somewhat addling to a child - way of describing someone with a terminal illness.

Simon Paul once turned up to a games lesson with this little beauty:
"Dear Mr. Grant, Please excuse Simon from games today as he has had cold and is feeling a little floppy.
Mrs. Paul"

I'd like to say we ripped him apart for it, but there was no need - he was already the long-haired son of a local vicar with his reputation already lying in tatters around his half-mast trousers.
So much for a merciful God.

A craze that went on for far too long was getting urgently catching someone's attention, then saying "nothing" as though they were cretins for asking. It went a little something like this: "Hey John! John!" "Yes, Tuppence?" "Nothing" (cue laughter)

What Jews are, apparently, according to a teacher at my primary school. Subtle racist undertones naturally lost on a group of cross-legged six year olds.

#3 in the lies of Troy Hawkins series.
Troy once also pulled aside a friend of mine, and told him he could get "Nuclear Hand Grenades" for a very reasonable price. Troy, we feel, had not put his usual amount of effort into making this lie believable.

In the periodic table, the element molybdenum (atomic weight 42) has the abbreviation of 'MO'. Obviously this being short for HOMO, proves without a doubt that '42' is therefore a completely GAY number and anyone getting 42% on an exam is a 100% vagina-decliner.

How to cheer up boring wet breaks. First get your hands on two bolts, one nut and a packet of Swan matches. Screw one bolt a turn and a half into the nut then fill the centre of the remaining hole in the nut with the 'explosive' material off the top of a number of matches. Carefully screw the second bolt in, not too fast or you could end up with a burnt hand. This done, you're ready with a primed explosive projectile device. I can't remember anyone getting hurt but it was exciting at the time - and noisy especially when the coat racks got a strike!

Someone of lower intelligence than than the rest of their group. Nutjobs were often administered chapatees, swift slaps to the forehead that made such a satisfying noise that people would turn from their conversations to say "that's good chapatee".

Good, clean fun that also helps control the population.
Nutshots was a game played over a three year period and involved a random, sudden and totally unexpected kick or punch to the testicles. The nutshot could come at any time of day or night. A strong emphasis on creativity - for example an out-of-the-blue backfist into the crotch during conversation - ensured that the tension and excitement of nutshots remained at a premium.