"How stupid you are" - a phrase inexplicably listed at the back of Tricolore, despite never being used in the book. This happy find made its way into letters, postcards, and essays on pets and family. Miss R tolerantly overlooked this habit, placing a pair of red brackets around the phrase and ignoring it. I like to imagine this perpetuated a belief that randomly insulting a Frenchman is correct and acceptable BUT ONLY INSIDE PARENTHESES.

What a schoolmate was said to have joined when he discarded his Game Boy, signed up for driving lessons, and started sneaking off to the pub at night with other cool-gang members instead of meeting the rest of us near the spooky old house around lunchtime on Saturday. Used with the jealous sneer.

Clearly just Technical Drawing rebranded with a pretentious London-artwank-college name.

Handfuls of soil and brown woodchips. Dirty rain was gathered from the shrubbery that bordered the playground before being distributed over a classmate's head with a jubilant cry of "Dirty rain!".

Then you got punched in the face.

Dread Dragon Droom, in which a capitalist bastard of a wizard invited you in for cakes and then demanded gold, was another BBC educational classic. A thrilling and absorbing game, combining vivid graphics with terrifying sound effects.

Inexplicably, when I downloaded it from the Internet the other day it was crap, blocky, and annoying.

All educational games began by asking you your name, which was obviously open to abuse.

"What do you want to do now, Fuck?"

> yes please

"We play the Lambeth way,

Not like you but a bit more gay

And when we have a bit of fun

Oh, boy."

When we gathered around the piano to sing this Broadway hit in primary school, we were specifically warned not to titter at the line containing 'gay'. I wasn't listening, and was therefore surprised to be the only one giggling.

The teacher snapped at me - which was quite unfair, considering that I saw nothing intrinsically funny about the word 'gay' and was only laughing to curry favour with more popular classmates.

Anyway, the song was written by Noel Gay. Draw your own conclusions.

Here is an old joke that I cannot fathom to this day. Please help me fathom it.

An Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman enter a haunted house which contains a single slice of Marmite-slathered bread. As the Englishman hungrily reaches for the snack, a terrifying voice booms, "I told you once, I told you twice: do not eat that Marmite slice!" The Scotsman, too, is frightened away from the slice; but the foolhardy Irishman consumes it, whereupon the voice sniggers, "I told you once, I told you twice: I wiped my bum on that Marmite slice."

Of course it is funny that the Irish ate a poo, but the joke is not satisfying, in millions of ways.

1. Whose was the mysterious voice? Why did a voice poo on the bread? And - crucially - how did three sane men mistake the poo for Marmite?

1,000,000. For the first two cycles of the joke, he hadn't told us twice, and for the very first, he hadn't even told us once. Changing the words from "told" to "warn" doesn't suddenly reset the counter. Or does it? Frankly I'm drunk.

What this joke proves, conclusively, is that Irishes eating a poo is funnier than common sense.

Maracas were the hand-grenades of the music room arsenal. Best launched from the upper platform in the drama studio, maracas would explode on contact with floor or head, scattering the enemy with small white pellets and imaginary gobbets of flaming napalm.

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.

A droll cartoon figure based on the classic textbook phallus. The testicles became the trademark chef's hat, while the tip of the penis served as the chef's legs.

Any phallus drawn on one's books or pencil-case could be rapidly and effortlessly transformed into a Rudey.

Not a game devised by Smith, but one that involved his bag. Essentially the same as Piggy in the Middle, but with the additional gameplay element of throwing the bag to nobody in particular and watching it smack against hard concrete.

The game was deprecated after a strawberry yogurt burst messily inside a compartment of the bag. Nonchalant as ever, Smith started using a different compartment for his lunch and left the yogurt to fester until he got a new bag months later.

The ideal Games option, allowing the loud macho lads to demonstrate their iron-pumping skills in the gym while we pale anaemics hid behind the upper stairwell above the squash courts. If caught and forced to enter the weights room, standard procedure was to occupy the exercise bike, strategically positioned behind an archway so that its user could minimise legwork and sneers from the lads while watching Annie Lennox on MTV on the opposite wall.