Tales from the school yard.

I ended up a decent boy's comp in in Hertforshire from the age of about 13. It was a funny sort of place, had a history going back to the 1600's but, a few weird traditions and some very old bits of building aside, it was basically a pretty ordinary small town comp... although I guess it had some of the trappings of the posher establishment it had once been. I think it had only recently stopped being a grammar school when I went there. We called the teachers "Sir" or "Miss" and we got called by out surnames, wore blazers, were organised into Houses, had prefects and a head boy and were made to go to church occasionally.

There were the usual bull-necked psycho PE bullies (it was a big rugby school). What was cool though was that after a while of the games masters realising they were fighting a losing battle trying to force the the effete, arty or just plain lazy amongst us to ruck and maul, they just kind of let us do whatever instead. This usually involved us hanging around the art or music rooms or messing about in the gym or weights room unsupervised or an hour or two every week.

The other thing that marks my memory of that school is the lack of a jocks/nerds divide, In our year, we somehow managed to exist in a pretty integrated mesh of daft bonhomie that I was astonished to find wasn't typical outside the school gates. I can't really recall any fights or rivalry of that sort. Although I was archetypal art-wuss, one my best mates was the school rugby captain and part of a core group of mates that extended friendships to all corners of the spectrum.

My rugby captain friend was a lovely bloke but academically hopeless. He wanted to be a games teacher but had to pass GCSE maths and chemistry to get onto the degree he needed, but he just could not do it. He came back at 6th form to re-sit and re-sit them. He ended up becoming really good close with his tutor, who was the only openly gay teacher at our school, a really well-liked chap called Mr Car. Thinking about it now he was probably only ten years old than us. Mr Car eventually got my mate through his exams and they remain good friends to this day. I met Mr Car again at my mate's wedding a couple of years back, we all hugged it up and spent ages reminiscing. We had some other awesome teachers including a music teacher who got electric guitars in and encouraged all of our teenage racket-making including letting us play Nirvana and Alice in Chains covers at the end of year concert. Go Mister Wright!

Academically, the year I was in was a fucking disaster though. Although the school has decent results now, for some reason, every single fucker who took A-Level maths in our year failed. I failed economics and Public Affairs because I hated it, never did any work or turned to any lessons. I wanted to do Art and Music but being an all boys rugby/science school, there weren't enough takers to run the course. So rather than leave my mates behind to go somewhere else, I just picked a bunch of random subjects so I could stay on at 6th form and have the time of my life with my mates for another two years. *slowclap for the choices of 16 year old me.

Biology I did enjoy, but failed spectacularly in large part due to the masochistic dick of teacher telling me, as I was going in to the exam; that my really close mate and study partner hadn't turned up as he'd been in a bad car accident and was being taken to hospital. Thanks for that.

I only only passed English with a B by banging out all of my required coursework in a marathon few days before the end of term. The two years I was doing it I had a succession of temporary teachers culminating in a young lady, fresh out of teacher training college, only a couple of years older than us and smoking hot. She was about 5'2 with a blonde pixie bob and she'd sit cross-legged on the desk wearing a flimsy summer dress and absentmindedly caress herself with a ruler. Her arrival coincided with us discovering sex, weed, booze and music was the end of my academic career really.

By that time me and mate's band was playing gigs in London and we'd hire busses to bring all out mates out to the Powerhaus or Borderline or wherever, she'd come with us, buy us drinks and totally predictably, ended up shagging several of us. Tragically, not me though. She left in hurry after shacking up with a guy who dropped out of 6th form to take up drugs as a full time hobby. No idea what happened to either of them.

Unless you count her, I don't think we had any actual paedos. Although we did have one very odd geography teacher who insisted on stripping down to a pair of leopard print trunks to join us in the weights room. He'd bring copies of weight lifting magazines for us to admire as well. We just thought it was a bit fnar fnar in an eye-rolling sort of way. I think we felt a bit sorry for him. He should have gone the summer dress and ruler route.

Famous alumni would be Ron Weasley (after me tho cos i'm oooold).

Other notable weirdos would be the eccentric physics teacher who drove an ancient Landrover with collapsed suspension and stickers that said "look no seatbelts" and "kill a tree for christmas". He was the paper for holding a party to celebrate the death of Princess Diana.