» The Weird Kid In Class

Another...
I joined my high school in year 8, and since I didn't know anyone I was quite desperate to fit in. After about a month or so, several people started remarking that I looked uncannily like a lad called Ashley, who had left at the end of year 7, before I joined. As I said, I was desperate to make friends so I kept namedropping the unknown fellow, and suggesting I looked like him to people who I had only just met just to get a bit of common ground.

It was shortly afterwards that I found out what he did during his brief stay at the school. The most common story was the time he went mental and tried to run away from home, only to phone his parents 1 hour later from a phone box in some rural Norfolk village asking to be picked up because he was lost.

Worse still was the story of his 'special move' which was called a 'stretchy'. Apparently it involved stretching his foreskin to epic proportions whilst naked in the changing rooms after PE. And to make matters worse, then running into the girls changing room whilst performing said act.

I stopped comparing myself to him after that. I very nearly ended up as the weird kid!

Apologies for length, would have been shorter if I hadn't strecthed it.
(Wed 24th Jan 2007, 12:46, More)

» The Weird Kid In Class

Maggots? Maggots...Maggots
We had a new kid start halfway through year 5 and his name was Jason. I was instantly alerted to his presence when I walked onto the playground that morning and found him singing Elvis songs surrounded by a group of other kids. He was an attention whore, and always claimed to be the best at every thing any body happened to mention. He also claimed to have a games console that could play SNES, Megadrive, Master System, NES and Lynx games but never let us see it.

Anyway, I had the misfortune of having to sit next to him. One afternoon, as the sun was beating through the windows and making the air hot and stuffy, I suddenly detected the unmistakeable scent of maggots. I was quite a keen little fisherman back then and so recognised it instantly. Panic struck me as I thought I may have left a tub of the wriggly blighters in my bag from the previous evenings fishing.

Luckily this wasn't the case, but I decided to mention it to the teacher just in case. She said she'd 'look into it'. The day went on, and the smell continued to hang in the air. We were then about to leave the class when the teacher took me aside and told me she'd located the source of the odour.

"It's Jason's socks!"

He must have been wearing them for weeks. Obviously his toes weren't wriggling with maggots, but they happened to take on the exact same smell.

Years after leaving school I found that Jason was doing the Elvis impersonating thing full time. Let's hope no one had a whiff of his Blue Suede Shoes...
(Tue 23rd Jan 2007, 14:01, More)

» Strict Parents

Not quite sure who to call...
When I was about 8 or 9, myself, my younger brother and my parents all sat down to watch Ghostbusters on TV. Things were starting to hot up - they'd set up the business, busted slimer, and that big statue/dog thing had terrorised a party. Then the news comes on halfway through the film, as it sometimes does (a practice I wasn't familiar with at that age).

As the day's headlines start to fill the screen, my parents somehow manage to convince my brother and I that the film is over, they caught all the ghosts, and everyone lived happily ever after.

It wasn't until a few days later they finally confessed that they'd heard the second half of the film was much scarier than the first, and so packed us off to bed. The injustice! If they knew this before, why did they let us watch the first half if we were never going to be allowed to see the rest?

I also got it into my head years later that I wanted a Venus flytrap. For some reason that was forbidden, but I was allowed to line my window with an army of prickly cacti which were far more dangerous...
(Thu 8th Mar 2007, 17:06, More)