School days

I'd like to think this blog was read by millions and that whilst I don't have to go to work because I make so much from advertising on the site, I go because it gets me out the house.

Unfortunately it's not, which is why I probably met more than half of you reading this twenty years ago this week.

I was at the school a couple of days, knocking about with the other new lads in Alpha 2 (Anthony O'Neill and Martin Watts spring to mind) until we had our first German class of the year with Van Der Fleet, which is when I knocked you all bandy with my fantastisch Deutsch.

Straight after the class I remember being swamped by a load of you asking me all sorts of questions, the most important of which was obviously "Which team do you support?" As I'd just seen them draw with Hearts in a friendly at Tynecastle a couple of weeks before, and they had the likes of Gascoigne and Lineker fresh off the back of a fine Italia 1990 campaign, I said Spurs, and as Danny had yet to fully discover the golden path that led to Priestfield, he was the one that celebrated the small victory of having the new lad support the same team as you. Unfortunately he tried to double up on the second most important question: "Where do you live" and when I said Hempstead, asked if that was the top end, via Maidstone Road. I'd discovered it wasn't, it was mid-'Stead, via the woods and the 'love tunnel' under the link road. This meant I soon walked to school with Mick of a morning, who was more concerned with the fact that I'd been living in his road for the past three months without appearing on the French family radar in any significant fashion.

I was appearing all too often soon enough though, as my time-keeping was shit-house even then and meeting at the top of the road at ten past eight normally meant Mick knocking on the door at quarter past to see if I was coming or not, whilst my mum wrestled with my nine-month-old baby brother.

I solidified my reputation about two weeks later when I got a "DT" from Wooton and had to pick up litter with Grievsy and Godfrey for an hour after school - after a whole lesson of being called Wiggy (Handa being weirdly lairy in Wooton's class) he lost it and belted me with a DT for an innocuous "Ah nae danger pal!" to which the whole class pissed themselves laughing and he thought it was some cruel in-joke that deserved a harsh punishment. Did I ever mention I had to steal the note he wrote about that incident from Harvey's office in the sixth form? Four years later I'm idlly flicking through my confidential file (He was tops Harvey weren't he?) when that 'report' from my first few weeks at school is still there. I was getting ready to do UCAS forms and all that caper! The Wiggy prick wasn't going to sabotage a glorious higher education so I nicked it, ripped it up and chucked it away later on.


Happy days!

(I'm glad we never had mobile phones in our day.)