When I was eight years old, my life up to that point had been so sheltered that I had never heard the word 'cunt'. That was, until an afternoon's trip to the local disused railway line to look at nature and that. An old bridge crossing the line was under repair, and the contract work was being carried out by local firm 'C R Reynolds'. This was apparent from the hoarding that had been attached to the scaffolding - 'C R REYNOLDS', it said. '... Is a cunt', a wag had added.

It was a life changing experience.

The baffling french output of Darren Brown, who refused to learn any other French words than "C'est". To make it up to a full sentence, he added the English words "with relish". This, he said often and plenty, and did not limit to French classes.

Defensive self-mockery. Should you fall over, or make a fool of yourself, this 'confession' will hopefully reduce external piss-taking. However, there are no guarantees.

"Cack" was our word for excrement - solid, liquid, cold or still steaming. Immortalised in the nursery rhyme,

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester,

In a shower of cack.

The dozy twat forgot his hat,

And it all ran down his back.

At least on this journey he was spared the indignity of stepping into a puddle of shit that went right up to his middle; although this must have been before that occasion, considering his oath never to return to Gloucester at the conclusion of that episode.

In fact, considering his adverse reaction to just getting his legs wet in the classic rhyme, you'd imagine a faecal downpour running over his head and face, before trickling its moist brown path along his spine would have caused a much earlier embargo on Gloucester-going, that might have spared him the unfortunate puddle incident.

I bet he liked it, the Hippocratic scatwizard.

A game in which you cak yourself.

The game of Cak requires a cricket ball to be thrown into the top of a conker tree, under which the cak players wait keenly for it, risking a skull-splitting thunk on their head.

Conker trees magnify the noise of the ball smashing into the branches, you can even feel it through the ground. Plus they're teasingly difficult to see through when in full leaf. Your ideal Cakking Tree will provide a throwing route up through the branches while also acting like pinball machine when the ball tumbles back down through the foliage.

This fearsome game was played regularly by about 10 of us for 4 years at school. And no-one died.

Martin K. got 'bonsed', as he was nonchalantly eating a sandwich. He failed to heed the cry of "cak", and he paid with his forehead. This marked Martin?s retirement from the game. The game of Cak.

Another innovation was the 'no looking up? round. This meant a steely-eyed battle of wills and terror rush where the sounds from above make you taste the adrenaline like metal.

Teachers would not stop the game of Cak, because they didn?t want to believe what we were doing. When one teacher asked what we were up to, possibly thinking we were terrorising a squirrel, we simply explained that it was "festive". He seemed happy enough with that.

Mr Thomas and Callum Savage developed an unhealthy rivalry. Mr Thomas took us for registration, music, and PE. The genuine wrestling match in registration was entertaining, especially since Callum appeared to be winning. The music room fiasco where Callum broke a Maraca by hitting Mr Thomas with it was even better. By far and away the best was the time Callum was bowling in softball (they're not soft, by the way) Mr Thomas stepped up to have a go, batted the ball stright back into Callums face, knocked him out cold and broke his nose. Kudos to Mr Thomas for finding the only accidental way to really hurt the boy.

Calypso Cups - fruit drinks packaged in brittle plastic containers - were the perfect size to place in a blazer pocket, and thus in exactly the right place for someone to punch, causing a whale-like spurt of sticky liquid up the owner's blazer. Pocketing the Calypso Cup is a beverage faux pas you make once, and once only.

Started by Camel (Thomas Wells) who, after two years at our primary school was taken out, ostensibly to be educated at home. To become a member of the club you had to be "Humped" by Camel himself or any other member of the club. Humping involved a strange bumping of Camel's chest onto your back while he shouted "HUMP!" God knows what it looked like to the bemused teachers and fourth years who stood watching us being chased around the playground, all of us wanting desperately to be humped but at the same time all being vaguely aware of the sexual connotations and knowing it was very wrong. Once initiated into the club your role was to hump any non-member in sight. You also got to go to club meetings where Camel would point out Camel Land on his map of the world and issue strange, coded orders. This is probably how cults start. Camel left our school not long after his club died out, due to a lack of new members to hump.

At lunch we had a chalkboard with the days lunch on, allowing easy alterations. Caramel Tart became Camel Fart, which meant i laughed for pretty much the rest of the week.

Even when you have left school and are working in a bakery, 'doughnuts' becomes 'dog nuts' with an alarmingly small amount of effort.

Roll-front wooden lockers were a gift to the catarrhal terrorist. You spend half an hour hacking up phlegm then select a locker. You slightly raise the front and then carefully dribble extremely glutinous phlegm - the Camel Yocker - into such a position that the locker front, when lowered, rests in it. Any subsequent raising of the locker front produces a glistening, nauseating curtain of yocker strands, preventing access to the locker's contents. If you were really lucky, you could distract the locker's owner at exactly the right time. He would then reach in without looking, pushing his hand through the napalm-like yocker waterfall.

At primary school there was a phase for building 'camps' along the edges of the playing fields. Pupils would dig out little trenches for toy cars and figures to play in. There were a lot of jealous reconnaissance strolls along the fields to check out the size and complexity of rival camps. Two of us had one along the back, and we planned to dig with tiny sticks under the train track so that we could run away to the Mysterious Cities of Gold. We didn't get very far.

During the height of the inexplicable Blockbusters mania of the eighties, it became a common "dare" in the class of a teacher - first name Robert - to ask "Can I have a 'P' please, Bob?" when you needed to go to the bogs. Sometimes you'd even get away with this. Unlike the perennial antagonist, Marty Halford, who once got a bit too excited, and asked "Bob, can I have a wank?".

A Tamil refugee came to our school. We found out that his parents had both been shot and spent many happy hours holding coins in front of his face saying "can you see it shine..." then under our breath we would add "...like the bullets..."

Decorative pastel coloured hoops strung onto elasticated string.

• Gasp one of the sweets between your teeth.
• Hook thumbs under the elastic and pull forward making it taut.
• Bite.Half for you - yum yum - and the other half goes flying at respectable speed into your target's head.

For extra targetting, go boss-eyed and use your nose as a crosshair.

Fond memories of primary school soggy boggies (q.v.) ensured that this habit died hard, and so many a breaktime in the first year of secondary school was spent rolling bits of the school-forged chocolate slab cakes into balls and throwing them at the polystyrene tiling of the canteen.

After a few weeks of this entertaining but artistically somewhat naïve practice, postmodernism set in when someone stood on a table to carefully attach a slice of cucumber onto the most recent crop of cake-based ceiling adornment.

The next day, the cucumber was still there. Days turned into weeks turned into months, and still it remained, clinging defiantly to the ceiling.

To our surprise and joy, it was still there when we started our second year the following September.

We made a pilgrimage to this spot after our last AS level exam, and lo and behold, there it was; brown, shrivelled, twisted, shrunken, but still recognisable as our very own slice of cucumber.

Our last AS exam was in May 2002. If anyone reading this is currently at Poynton High School, could you see if it's still there? If you enter the canteen from the main entrance, it's slightly away from the far right corner, the one with the heater thing on one wall and the windows/fire exit on the other.

Writing the name of your favourite band on your yellow canvas bag? Cool. Liking the Cure? Really cool! Decorating your bag with a lovingly rendered Cure logo? Kool and the fucking Gang!

However, make sure you finish the logo, and don't have a break half-way through the word, otherwise someone may write a crude "NT" after your lovingly crafted "CU". Well, they did to me, anyway.

My "Public Image Limited" logo became "pillock" thanks to someone's black biro, but it was such a shit insult, I didn't bother to scribble it out. Get me!

My mate got his mum to embroider the full Marillion logo on his bag in wool, proving astonishing dedication in the public advertisement of a shit taste in music. Sacks came from army surplus stores in yellow, blue or black, though the last of these was less good as it allowed less opportunity for decoration.

The truly hard could place theirs in the bus queue and saunter off to the shops, knowing that the personalized sacks, recognized by all like a medieval baron’s livery, would hold their place for them. Hopeless geeks like me, pathetic enough to draw the African National Congress flag on mine in a spasm of late 1980s adolescent political consciousness, could not.