My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle Read Free Book Online Page B

lockable room in which you could sit out lunchtime. Teachers would sometimes give the keys to their classroom to responsible kids, ostensibly to do work. It was actually so these weaker specimens could have a locked door between them and those who wanted to take their money, humiliate them or simply punch them repeatedly in the arms and legs. I was in the Latin Club and half a dozen of us would have lunch there for a couple of years. I’dnever studied Latin, and could probably have survived in General Population. Michelle Caldwell was in the Latin Club though, and she tended to cross her legs in a way that let you see up her skirt. I loved Latin Club.
    I should probably mention here that the Latin teacher who let us have the room was a nice chap who was the school’s expert on sex education. A spindly, balding man with a ginger homeless beard, he’d occasionally pop up into religious classes and give a lecture on contraception. Apparently the only thing that was allowed was something called the rhythm method, but withdrawal was preferable to, eh, using a condom. I imagined that he practised withdrawal a wee bit himself as he had a noticeable facial twitch. Almost a spasm, it made him look as if he was about to yell out some obscene prophecy. He had nine children.
    Even having a room didn’t guarantee safety as often crowds would gather round them like zombies, trying to break in or holding the door closed after the bell so everybody inside would be late for their next class. A guy tried to break into the Latin room one time through one of those little strips at the top of a window, the kind you have to undo with a hook on a stick. He was an enormous, powerful guy—unbelievably tall. I knew his family and they had contacted The Guinness Book of Records because they were convinced that he had the biggest feet of any boy his age in the world. I also knew he was adopted. Who knows how his adoptive parents must have felt as this enormous, villainous cuckoo grew to dwarf them in their home? It was a tense lunchtime, two of us trying to stop the door from being kicked in,the others trying to push these record-breaking feet back out through the window.
    There was a lot of behaviour from the kids that just verged on madness. On our first day in technical class we got this long lecture about safety in the classroom. We were all just looking at each other in disbelief thinking, ‘No way! They’re giving us chisels?’ Within seconds of the talk finishing someone blew metal filings into somebody else’s eyes and that was that—a year of technical drawing instead.
    One of the technical teachers had a bizarre burbling voice. He was a bit like an incomprehensible version of Bernie Winters. Once he gave me a long talking to and I had genuinely no idea if it was praise or censure. Probably the latter, as I was pish at techie. There was an assignment to build a little bookcase once. I didn’t have a clue so I stole the display model that the teacher had done. Just so it wasn’t too obvious I re-glued the runners on the bottom and ended up with a C.
    The technical classes back then were idiotic. Teenage kids are like the A-Team. Give them a few rudimentary objects and they’ll construct a death machine of some kind. By the end of term the class was more tooled up than an Orc army. It’s like a conspiracy. Why don’t they teach kids in poor areas how to be hedge-fund managers and bond traders? Instead they get shown how to make mug trees and spice racks.
    Years later I was writing on 8 out of 10 Cats , working on their Big Brother special. I’d watched Big Brother all that week to get up to speed and was pretty horrified.
    ‘They must really sift through the applicants to find such fucking idiots!’ I groaned. ‘I mean, people aren’t all just fucking idiots are they?’
    Jimmy Carr just looked at me patiently and said, ‘Don’t you remember school?’ I suppose that’s true, the place was full of utter goobers. Once we were