I have vivid memories of an alcoholic maths teacher we had in the two years prior to taking O levels. If we were lucky enough to get an afternoon maths lesson, Mr B (name witheld in the unlikely event the old sop is still breathing) would more often than not be more than a little worse for wear having spent a two hour liquid lunch break in some local watering hole. As would be expected the latent merciless cruelty of school kids always rose to the surface on these occasions when his whisky befumed lectures on the finer points of trigonometry were often interrupted by our gales of laughter.
One prank that often ended in the holding of sides involved sliding our ancient school desks around on the highly polished floor. These desks were the all-in-one kind on worn steel runners - see pic.
This wheeze could be accomplished almost silently owing to the lack of friction between the time worn smooth steel runners and the worn polished floor surface, so that when Mr B turned round from the blackboard we were all in different places, and the braver amongst us would be sitting at their desks with their backs facing the blackboard! Being somewhat pissed our teacher knew something was afoot but rarely worked out exactly what was going on.
Another trick played on this poor unfortunate was put into operation in the warmer months, for reasons that will become apparent. If we had a lesson in a particular classroom on the ground floor at one end of the main building, and again when his back was turned, one at a time a few of us who were sat near the outer wall would climb out the open window nearest to their desk, make their way round the end of the building, re-enter, knock on the classroom door and say something along the lines of "Sorry I'm late sir, got asked to run an errand". This would happen two or three times, sometimes the same boy doing it more than once, before Mr B twigged!
Oh how we laughed.
The very last lesson we had from the old lush ended when he was so drunk he fell over when turning round from the blackboard (nothing to do with us I hasten to add). One of us reported the incident because by now it was no longer funny. Two teachers turned up and hauled him off, never to be seen again!
Somehow I passed my O level maths with flying colours, how I don't know.
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Being not bad at footy at the time, when I was in junior school I actually manged to get in the school team on a couple of occasions. Passing my 11 plus meant a future in the Grammar School, where to my horror I soon discovered that football was not on their radar. You played Rugger by God, and liked it. For an over-tall and underweight bag of bones like I was at the time a more inappropriate sport than Rugby cannot be imagined. Imagine an 11 year old Peter Crouch - luckily my growth rate slowed considerably after the age of about 14, and stopped at a sensible 6 foot 2 inches a few years later. To make matters worse our games master was Bob Taylor ex Northampton Saints & England. He did not suffer the weak willed gladly I can say.
It did not take long before I was coming up with every excuse under the sun to avoid Rugby, and having seen how useless I was, Bob Taylor being a decent bloke often let me get away with it. Instead he sent the fat, the weak, and us malingerers on the dreaded cross country runs. A mate and I had the good fortune to live about 100 yards away from the school as the crow flies. Between our homes and the school playing field was a commercial orchard. You can see what's coming can't you? Once we were set on our way for the one hour romp through the town's parks, and of course when out of sight, we would double back on ourselves, climb the fence, run through the orchard, over my mate's back garden fence and spend the next half an hour playing his singles - we were both into Slade, T-Rex, Bowie, pop was so much better then, sigh - and then ran back through the orchard, hid in the bushes until the by now exhausted fat boys trundled past, rejoined the race making sure we didn't finish last. Did we get caught? Of course! We often had to run the damn thing after school followed by a teacher, who would appear at strategic points en route to make sure we didn't cheat again, get in his car, drive to the next vantage point and so on. Bastard. Also, my mate's mum kept getting asked why she liked Jeepster so much, had she gone off Elvis? It didn't take her long to rumble our game either.
Sheer torture! If this was from our school runs, I'd be one of those barely visible specks at the back. I do believe the lad at the front is wearing gloves too, a luxury I'm sure we were deffo not allowed. I'll bet he was the Rugger captain, the sod.
Footnote - News out earlier this week showed reseach has found evidence that ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome could (my emphasis) be caused by a virus. This is a condition where the body essentially says "Sod this, I'm having a kip". God, I wish ME had been around when I was trying to skive off rugby - oh, hang on it was, but back then it was known as Malingerer's Excuse!
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