Directed Study is where you were put if you were a "classroom distraction". You got put in an isolated location for several days instead of being allowed to attend regular class. In my case, it was a janitorial closet/supply room just off the main hall. The powers that be seemed to think this was punishment. Since I hated nearly all my white trash classmates and was bored stupid with the narrow curriculum offered by the corn pone teachers, this gave me the opportunity to wrap up with the busy work fast so I could spend the rest of my time drawing. Now I am a professional artist in a big city and they're all still there inbreeding.

Thanks guys! I don't miss any of you.

Dirty, Fat, Sod. Applied to any overweight boys who had shown an interest in sex.

There's this girl that my friend used to go out with, from a different town of course, and on Christmas her dad disappeared. Oh no! Three days later there came a wierd smell - from the chimney. Scream! When the fire brigade broke open the chimney, to find out what could possibly be up there, lo and behold, there was her dad dressed as Father Christmas. Gaspers! You see, right, he'd tried to play a clever trick, but it had shockingly backfired as he had got stuck, because he never thought to inform his wife beforehand, or indeed shout when he became trapped.

This urban legend did the rounds every year, even after chimneys were virtually unheard of, until it became so crippled and tired that even the teller would dispense it with a weary offhand cynicism.

If you hear anyone telling it this year, kick out their sex.

Dance, Dance,
Wherever he may be.
For I am the lord of
My dad's settee,
And I'll lead you now,
Wherever you may be
And I'll lead you all
In my dad's settee.

This never really made much sense, but I never questioned it and sang along with everyone else in assembly. Jesus was in charge of a piece of furniture and he could dance on it or fly around on it as he saw fit. Because that's what Jesus does.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one. However, instead of the prosaic 'dad's settee', my version featured the more mysterious 'dawn settee.' The accompanying mental image of Jesus standing on a sofa, arms raised, with a psychedelic sun rising in the background was quite stirring.

Minus the sunlight
Minus the morning
Here in the bright light
Of the SPARE DAY

Equally baffling was the reference to "springing, fresh from the lawn" which only added to the surreal imagery of the lyrics, perhaps referring to the blackbird who has pulled up some tasty worms.

What you get after removing the limbs of a Daddy Long Legs. They still fly, you know.

As a child, this one-line song was performed every time I had finished a number two, prompting my father to come into the bathroom and wipe my arse. This is normal for small children, of course, but I got used to this luxury and opted-out of doing the deed myself probably for longer than I should have.

Eventually my patient father encouraged me to get on in life, fend for myself and embrace the defecation related hygiene that came with it. In time, I had almost forgotten about my brown jingle.

That was until I reached comprehensive. I'll never forget the mix of shame and fear I felt hearing my older brother and his gang of rough bully-boys yelling 'Da-dee I have Fi-niiiiiished' across a packed playground on my first day.

Named after a Mr Wakem, who was (in retrospect) clearly traumatised from his time in the Army - he would ask questions, and reward a wrong answer with the most vicious beating. this would be accompanied by cries of 'daddy whackers' from all the boys. Curiously, we all loved him and were very sad when he was taken away to a safer place.

Alan was "special" in the energetic, disruptive, pissing-the-teacher-off kind of way. Textbook ADD hyperactivity I suppose, but as he wasn’t a mong we would play with him quite happily at breaktimes. One breaktime we were talking about the new Dairylea advert and musing on what we would do for a Dairylea triangle.

Alan said "Well, I wouldn't do this", stuck out his bottom slightly and then proceeded to shit himself. We played less with Alan after this.

Dairy Lee was the name given in primary school to Lee Stocker, because he was on milk tokens due to his family having no money.

A method of protecting your favoured place in a canteen. A pritt-stick, lid off, was hurled to the ceiling directly above your chair. The threat of non-toxic adhesive looming ever above would deter any pretenders to your plastic throne.

Leaving you to sit under it, instead. A mixed blessing.

We had one teacher who, on entering the classroom would close the door unneccesarily hard, possibly to make up for small or non-functioning genitalia. Having enjoyed sticking a generally disliked chap's pritstick to the ceiling as a form of bullying for some time it was decided by most of the class who owned pritsticks that we should prime a trap for the soon to arrive teacher. We managed to get approximately ten stuck just inside the door before our lookout ran into the class, clearly excited. We sat, to a man bricking ourselves, in silent trepidation. I could hazard a guess that i wasn't the only person who, seconds before detonation, wished i hadn't taken part, or wasn't even in the room. events transpired as follows:

1: Teacher enters the room, turns, slams door.

2: 4 or 5 pritsticks fall on and around him

3: Teacher goes spastic.

Its great looking back, but i genuinely feared for my life at the time. We all got detentions, even the kids who were too poor to even own pritsticks, the twats.

The lyrical mainstay of Paul Yates second (and sadly last) school assembly pop extravaganza.



To set the delicious scene; Paul was NOT your normal school league pop kid. He looked like H from Steps had been interrupted whilst morphing into a football. His fringe and forehead seemed thrust together as a result of seperate, geographically divorced planning committees. His shirt cuffs were always a good seven inches prouder then his jumper sleeves.

He was good at all subjects and correspondingly bad at all other aspects of life - including not being considered a bed wetting chess club stalwart.

He happily admitted doing an hour of voluntary "study" (not homework, study) each night at home, as if this deserved anything other than scowls and occasional violence. His sister showed solidarity with her brother's cause by sprouting a moustache at the age of 14.

Despite all this, Paul scored minor pop kudos for a keyboard backed lament about nuclear war one assembly day. We begrudgingly gave him credit for his efforts.

Flushed with success, a later assembly found him sitting behind a "drum kit" assembled from the kettle drum, a snare drum, and all the other crap the dumb kids got to vent on during group pieces. To our delight, he proceeded to thrash (alone, without any other accompaniment) arhythmically like a waterheaded Keith Moon, whilst trilling in an odd adolescent contralto;

Dance to the music,
rock rock rock.
Everybody is doing it,
rock rock rock.

Please note his failure to conjugate "everybody" and "is" into a less rockless "everybody's". Oh yes, he even incited group bachannalian abandon politely. Of course, we laughed. A sound which his brain appeared to translate into applause.

He never performed another self-penned opus, so this remains the highlight of my school life. Paul, if you're out there; home studios are very cheap now. Please, Paul. You owe it to rock.

A 'dangly-greenie' was some greened hock which could be spit out slowly and dangled from the mouth (generally over the face of your victim) which had enough flexibility to be sucked up and down at will. Competitions for the longest dangly-greenie were held regularly - if you could let it touch the ground and then suck it back up, you were a master-dangler.

Also known as "absailors"

A manoeuvre in the school photography darkroom, where a guy would attempt to get a girl to grope his exposed cock without her ever finding out who he was. Pioneered by Adam Hartley circa 1989, on Lisa Wade. Hartley had earlier in his career perfected the illicit 'classroom wank' in double Biology, and the art of 'farting very loudly in assembly and getting away with it', by simply erupting into laughter and taking the rest of the hall with him into fits of giggles, including the teachers. Genius.

Darren Carrington was fucking loopy, I swear. He used to insist on walking home with me and my mate, even though we both hated him, and would not speak to him all the way home. He would just walk along, listening silently to our conversation, and then leave us when our routes seperated. But this was only the start.

At the age of 14 or 15, he let it be known that he had joined the navy, and his given reason was that he wanted "to go and bomb pakies in Bosnia". Over the next few months we got running updates on his naval exploits - about how he had sworn aboard ship and been fined £10, how he had got angry and punched his captain in the eye, and as a result had had his hat taken away, and to top it all off, his commanding officer let him take HMS Belfast, one of the biggest ships in the fleet, into dock, but he had run it up on a sandbank, and would have to go back the next night to rescue it with a crane.

He would come into class with technical manuals for a Ford Capri, and a bag full of spanners. He laughed like gas coming out of a tap, a horrible whining groan of a laugh. He would say "I don't mind them niggers, but I just can't stand pakies." He was obsessed with Star Trek, but appeared to have never seen it.

He had 4 brothers - Wayne, Dan, Stu and Steve. Wayne was apparently "inside for welding a paki to a lamppost". When we asked him how he had defied the laws of physics by bonding skin and metal with a flame, he said that he hadn't actually bonded them, but had carried the poor fellow, still conscious, up the lamppost, tied a metal bar round him and welded that in place. Strangely enough, we still didn't believe him.

Speaking of Wayne, there was a morbidly fat, pigeon-toed boy in my year called Wayne. His older, bespectacled brother, similarly fat, was called Glenn (like the fat kid off Grange Hill). I can't hear those names now without thinking 'fat'. Did anyone else know any lithe, slim, fit Waynes or Glenns?

I know quite a few fit Waynes, but you're right about the Glenns. Every Glenn I know is short, fat, and wears glasses and roleplays.

For a moment, reading your submission, I thought "Roleplays" were a kind of shoe. Maybe they should be.