MarkW

Depends. Were you the examiner?

No, I don't think anyone died when I was there, although I did hear that two lads in our year died of heroin overdoses a couple of years after leaving. No idea if it's true or not - I haven't given a toss about any of them in over 30 years. Well, that's not strictly true: I did give a toss about my best friend, but he's dead too (bike accident), and there was a girl from my year that I used to go out with when we were in our very early 20s. We were at her house on Sunday in fact - she gets on like a house on fire with my wife. To be honest, everyone gets on with my wife - it's me they find more of an acquired taste!

The funny thing is that despite spending five years at a high school with a reputation for being the roughest in the area, I can't really remember anything that bad happening. There was loads of stupid petty stuff that went on, like chucking the Winchester through the plate glass window of the upstairs computer room (this was the 1980s for anyone wondering what the f*ck a Winchester is) or leaving the fire hoses turned on in the less-frequented parts of the building so that the first anybody knew about it was when water came cascading down the stairs, but then just as much of the bad behaviour came from the teachers. We used to be left completely unsupervised when we went swimming because the two teachers who took us would nip off for a quick length in the changing room, and another of the teachers used to drive the minibus pissed: we watched out of a classroom window once as he was bringing a load of kids back from a sports day. He mounted the kerb at the far end of the car park and knocked a lamppost down. We did torch a teachers car once (not me personally - some lads in my year). She kept an old jerry can of petrol in the back because the fuel gauge didn't work, and one morning she got in it to find that it had fallen over and leaked its entire contents into the carpet. She drove in with the windows down, and left it on the staff car park with the boot open to get rid of the fumes. Naturally someone tossed a match in and up it went. If I remember correctly, she was actually quite pleased.

Our deputy head was retired early due to dementia. Poor bloke had taught at the school all his life, and kept coming in thinking he was still employed. One time he turned up in what used to be his geography class, demanding to know why the French teacher was in there instead. We all said "She's gone mad sir - we kept telling her it should be geography now but she won't listen." Then we sat back and watched the utter chaos as he tried to have her forcibly removed from the classroom.

Me too! I'm less enthusiastic about a bill of nearly 400 quid for the privilege of dipping cubes of totally unremarkable bread into it though. Good job it's my company, or I'd have some explaining to do!

I only got sent to the headmasters office a few times at high school, and never for anything serious, but one occasion sticks in my mind because he had to abandon any hope of telling me off because he couldn't stop sniggering. I had suggested in RE class that God either didn't exist, or that he had gone to extraordinary lengths to give this impression. You can't see him, you can't hear him, he allows good and bad things to happen fairly arbitrarily to both devout believers and ardent atheists, and praying to him has no better outcome than random chance. "But I do hear the Lord speak to me!" she snapped. "Perhaps you're mentally ill then, miss..."

Basel last week - after day 1 of a trade show, with ten of my colleagues who thought it sounded nice. My poor credit card...

I mean seriously: nearly £30 for the privilege of poking bits of bread into a communal pot of melted cheese. Since when did that constitute a proper meal?

Couldn't say. I was kicked out of RE in primary school once (well, several times if I'm being honest) when the religious old bat who taught us asked what everyone wanted to be when they grew up. All the girls wanted to be vets or nurses, and all the boys wanted to be footballers or firemen. All except me. I said I wanted to be a hitman.

Err... I dunno - I can't remember posting that. To be fair, drink had probably been taken... You could really do with your children being sober when they go to school no wonder he was going to be hitting folk with his dick. I think I remember this incident now. Same son, but he didn't threaten to hit anyone with his dick - he called someone a "penis face" in class, which caused his teacher huge embarrassment in the re-telling because she couldn't bring herself to say "penis" in front of me in the playground. In fairness, I was stark naked at the time...

Err... I dunno - I can't remember posting that. To be fair, drink had probably been taken...

Another thing his teacher raised was that my son has little enthusiasm for the endless class tests that kids seem to be subjected to these days. I said that you don't fatten a pig by weighing it all the time, and that far from being lazy he was in fact indulging in a complex and sophisticated response to a world crazed by pointless activity. We also discussed their toothless bullying policy, my son having come home one day with bruises up his arms from having been punched by the school bully - a yobbish ginger turd with a chavvy diamond stud in his ear. Apparently the punching resulted from my lad stepping in when he saw one of his friends being bullied, and saying "I like your sparkly earring. Do you wear frilly knickers too?" The bully was dragged off and made to sit on a chair in Contemplation Corner. I said I was perfectly happy to leave them to deal with bullying their own way as long as it was effective, but that the next time this lad hits my son I'd toe-punt the fat little f*cker over the fence, and his Neanderthal father would be following close behind. I might put myself forward for the PTA...

At the school parents evening last week one of the teachers told me that my 10 year old boy was struggling a bit with some of the maths topics they were doing. He then proceeded to show me his exercise book, which was full of sums with green question marks next to them (they don't use red ink or crosses, as these are 'demoralising' apparently). The teachers comments were all along the lines of "What a marvellous maths mistake! Well done! Let's think about this in reflection time." WTF?! When I was his age I was in the headmasters class. He was a deeply unpleasant man - a bully and an overt racist - but his teaching methods had something to recommend them. Every Friday morning we had a maths test, and if you failed it you had to stand up whilst he fired some of the questions at you that you'd got wrong. "You - Einstein - stand up! How many decilitres are there in 16 decalitres? Nine?! NINE?! You bloody halfwit! Is your brother as stupid as you? Two halfwits would make a whole wit, wouldn't they. Your parents both work at the local university don't they? With your brains I can only assume you were adopted - they must be disappointed they can't swap you for someone more intelligent. Why don't you go and ask the cleaning lady to show you how to scrub toilets, because that's all you'll ever be good for. Now sit down you cretin, and stay in at playtime and revise." Then, in the afternoon art lesson, when everyone else was painting or making collages you'd have to make a pointy hat out of coloured card and decorate it with a big glittery 'D' and tinsel. You would then have to wear this creation in class for the rest of the day whilst he referred to you sneeringly as 'Professor' or 'Brain of Britain' every time you were spoken to. The upshot was that almost nobody failed the test a second time, and as far as I am aware none of us was psychologically scarred by the experience. Years later I was tempted to try his approach myself whilst teaching genetics and statistics to biomedical students, but even by the 1990s we'd gone soft. Anyway, I suggested to my son's teacher that he might get better results if he stopped pretending that failure was just as good as success, and that producing a cohort of kids who are intimidated by red ink hardly equips them for the harsh realities of life. Suffice to say neither suggestion was well received.

I think that was meant for MR_W rather than me

I'm starting to think that the problem with the NHS is that it's full of people not having heart attacks.

Griptwister has been unmasked!

A tad My version is better, though. I always like to raise Genesis 38:9 with the barmy old bats from the church who knock on my door wanting to talk to me about God: "So, when God told Onan to f*ck his dead brothers wife and then killed him for w*nking on the carpet instead, what moral lesson are we supposed to take from that?"

Yup - my surgeon friend is highly skilled, and wants out: she keeps asking if there are any jobs going in our lab! She said the UK ranks pretty badly in the WHO healthcare listing: I can't remember where we come now and can't be arsed to look, but I think several European countries and Australia (or maybe she said Austria) come ahead of us. I don't think the US fared too well (unsurprisingly) but then she gets very annoyed when people suggest that if we didn't have the NHS we'd have the American system, as though they were the only two options for healthcare provision. We're going over for Sunday lunch in a couple of weeks, so I'll fill her with red wine and see what I can get out of her.

"Never w*nk on the carpet when you should be balls deep in your brothers wife" (slight paraphrasing of Genesis 38:9).

Fortunately my oldest school friend (and ex-girlfriend from about 22 years ago) is a surgeon in our local hospital, and whenever we need to go in (which isn't often, fortunately) she always pops down to make sure everything's going smoothly and kick some arse if it isn't. Top lass. Actually, come to think of it she is one of three straight women to have told me that if they were otherwise inclined they'd happily get it on with my wife. Hmmm... food for thought there...

Did you see the one where his wife kept nagging to go on holiday .... so he took her to Blackpool , when they got there he had a job and had her holding his ladders , she did get a day on the beach . I saw it - standing in the pouring rain holding his ladders!

On a related subject, I saw an old episode of Fred Dibnah on YouTube the other day, climbing up the side of a massive factory chimney and strolling around the top with no safety gear whatsoever. That bloke was a lunatic!

Pull yourself together FFS, and remember that there's always someone worse off than you. For example, I once had a French girlfriend who made me a cup of tea by putting a teabag and some milk in a bowl of cold water and shoving it in the microwave. She had nice tits though.

Evening all! My 10-year old is trying to make a little Lego stop motion animation, and I was wondering if anyone could recommend some free software for stitching the images together into a video. I used to have MovieMaker on my old PC which worked fine for this sort of thing, but I don't have it any more. I tried Filmora, but the free trial version doesn't seem to have any facility for increasing the transition speed of the individual frames. Any suggestions much appreciated!

I was just sorting through some old images and came across this photo of the moon I took last year: Can't see any Clangers, though.