Tales from the school yard.

People would hold their index and middle finger together and curl them to form a sort of spoon. They would then fill the spoon with snot and spit and then flick it silently onto someone's back. This reached a peak when one lad filled one of those tins below during a lesson

How did we survive as a species

The compass above reminded me of the lad in my year who had no nerves in his hand so, as a party trick, would stab it repeatedly with a compass.

For a while it was popular to hold a pencil under someone when they were just about to sit down so they got impaled like a tiny punji stick. That ended when someone did it with an automatic pencil instead of a wooden one, the graphite broke off in the guy's arse and he had to go to hospital to get it surgically removed.

Lots of screwing

I went to a boys grammar school but apparently either it or I was quite boring.

Did have a noncey chemistry teacher though. Another chemistry teacher used to turn up drunk and was once quite racist towards a group of Chinese people who were visiting the school. Didn't see much of him after that.

It's far worse when it's not snot & spit.

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.

is there a disproportionate link between fixie skidders and private/boarding schools?

It's an expensive hobby and there is probably an intersection with the age people are attracted to it. I mean who can afford NJS adorned Kerin frames out of post-tax income in their early 20s? A bit like Supreme.

Didn't the guy who started TFG go to one of the big public schools? So I can well imagine it was big enough among his mates for him to pitch it as a retail opportunity to his family.

I think I saw @velocio post about the demographics of the forum a few years ago. IIRC we’re predominantly white male with a far higher affluence and proportion of phd’s than the average population. Perhaps VB can remind us or update the stats?

Apologies in advance then for bringing down the average: I went to a shitty comprehensive near Brighton...
No noncing that I'm aware of then or since, but plenty of beatings, bullying and occasional arson.
Am enjoying this thread tho

On the subject of compasses....
Who tattooed themselves/mates with biro ink? I got 3 dots on my thumb, gone now 20yrs later, might redo them ;)

Also reminded me of my mate Vake piercing his own ear with a borrowed earring. He bled everywhere and puked over the girl he was sat next to.

1 Attachment

piercing his own ear with a borrowed earring

I did that too. I figured that I didn't want to piece it with a needle then take it out and try and shove in an earring so why not use the earring in the first place. Turns out they're pretty blunt and it got most of the way through but took a lot of effort to pierce the skin on the back. That really hurt.

A 16 yr old lad in the year above me lived in Hedgerley, about 6 miles from school. He didn't bother with the school bus or cycling, oh no he drove one of these on L-plates. He definitely was not one of the cool kids but he was less likely to die on that than on a Fizzie or AP50.

His father collected old fire engines and so he started on tractors.

How old are you?

That looks like something from a pre-war children's book.

This was 1975 and the tractor was about 30 years old then. I am 21 obvs.
Which of these two highlighted students looks like a tractor driver?

1 Attachment

Mate of mine did the same at Hull Ice Arena to impress a girl. She numbed his ear with ice from her coke and poked her own earring through his ear. He almost passed out. Then almost vomited. Within a week his mum took it out as it was seriously infected and it closed up. It was a fortnight of laughing in his face and about a year of taking the piss out of him.

This was 1975

There has understandably been plenty of chat about arson, assault and paedophilia, but your picture reminds us that some of the worst crimes were against fashion.

Platform boots, Oxford Bags and big collars were a common sight as were the ubiquitous DMs and Sta Prest strides. I don't have as much hair now but I can grow a beard and some of it is brown.

I can grow a beard and some of it is brown

But I imagine, like mine, there's an awful lot of white in it now.

I call them "natural highlights".

I didn’t really dress like anything for the first few years of high school, I do remember having, and being really proud of, a big puffy yellow snowboard jacket that only had a half zip on the front so I had to take it off over my head. It had pockets big enough to fit my portable CD player which made it extra awesome.

About 3rd or 4th year I became a goth, wore nail varnish and eyeshadow and an upside down cross that the deputy head (who incidentally looked really like the demon headmaster) didn’t like so I had to hide it whenever he was about. He cottoned on eventually and gave me a punny exercise that was to write a story based on some topic he plucked out of thin air. The story I wrote was Marilyn Manson and Black Sabbath lyrics combined into something that barely made sense but he didn’t notice.

Wonder if anyone else's school experienced the peculiar trend of 'fainting' where you sat/squatted with your head between your knees, breathed in and out really fast and shallow then jumped up and, with any luck, passed out?

I think the longer you were out for the 'cooler' it made you. There was an assembly about it where we were all told that it was strictly forbidden and would be harshly punished after a few kids knocked their teeth out/cracked their heads as they went down.

Talking of punny exercises, we had an english teacher who doled them out like it was going out of fashion. You had to get them signed by a parent too. Thing is, he must have known that everyone forged the signatures as he kept them in a big file and for what seemed like months on the run up to parents night he'd threaten to get the file out and show our 'rents as a way of controlling us.

I had some homework or something in one of my jotters that my mum had legitimately signed in a nice bold black pen and I traced that but eventually got good enough at it that I could do her signature without even referring to it.

We did a similar thing where you hyperventilated then stood with your back to a wall, crossed your arms and someone pressed on your chest. You'd sink down in place and everyone in the room took the opportunity to put in a swift kick.

Running alongside the school playing fields was piggy path. We were near the Mars factory so you could smell when they were making Spangles, I digress. A mystery Mars worker used to ride his bike home from the factory via said path around lunchtime. If you were sat in the right place on the playing field you'd hear an "Oi!" and a plastic bag full of Mars chocolates etc would be launched over the hedge. All that and we never even got asked to suck him off.