Frankie Boyle - My Shit Life So Far

There was also a game called Emlyn Hughes’s Supersoccer. Like everybody, we hated Emlyn Hughes but the game was strangely compelling. There was a bug where if you put a heavy tackle in on someone they would just sort of die – lie down on the pitch and just never get up. Their inert form would be repositioned by the computer for free-kicks. You could also score from a kick-off by taking a really big run-up and just blooter it into your opponent’s goal. My brother and I had a tensely negotiated agreement not to do this and we both did it absolutely every time.

I was about eleven when I started going to the cinema by myself; my parents just had no interest in that kind of thing. I really wanted to see Star Wars because everybody at school had the action figures and was talking about Return of the Jedi. Eventually my dad said he’d take me. What he actually took me to was the first Star Trek movie, the really shit one with the baldy woman in it. I’ve never had the heart to tell him.

The first thing I went to see on my own was Footloose. I was really into old rock and roll records and thought it sounded brilliant. I borrowed my brother’s fake leather jacket and sat in the cinema with the collar turned up. It’s still pretty weird that those guys were Kevin Bacon and Chris Penn, and that it was basically gay.

I started taking my sister along to the local cinema in Muirend, a real time capsule with staff who looked like they were being hunted by Ghostbusters. There was a doorman called Frank. Strictly speaking, what he was actually called was ‘Frank the Wank’, something people shouted at him everywhere he went. I was on a bus years later and two teenagers saw him coming out of a newsagent in his civvies and actually got off the bus to shout it at him. I’d drag my sister along to my choice of movies – which meant every rubbish fantasy film that came out, things like Krull and Beastmaster. I think my parents would give me the ticket money for both of us if I took her along, so I’d bribe her with Maltesers and she’d sit there dispassionately watching Rutger Hauer have an unconvincing swordfight with a man dressed as a cyclops.

I was really excited when the old cartoon version of The Lord of the Rings got a showing at the GFT. As a kid I’d have been delighted to know that everybody would eventually get into Tolkien. This is back in the days when fantasy was just for total nerds. There were about a dozen to fifteen heavily bespectacled kids – one was a diabetic whose mum had brought him a big box of raisins for a snack. It was great to set eyes on Glasgow’s other dweebs. There was a bit when Aragorn laid into some orcs and we just all went mental. I think life is a lot different for alternative kids nowadays. Texting and the internet mean that being a Goth or something means you’re part of a big social scene, it’s an inclusive thing. Back then, we all just went our different ways in the afterglow, wishing each other all the best with the next ten years of bullying.

I know one shouldn’t dwell on the past, so I’ve really tried to put the misery of my secondary education behind me. On the other hand, if I ever meet Steven Tilsbury again, I’m going to bundle him into the back of a campervan, which I’ve had specially adapted by the Chinese military, and he’s going to spend a very difficult nine months strapped to a surgical table, fed intravenously, while I create a masterpiece of suffering with a nail file and a cigarette lighter. STEAL MY FOOTBALL SOCKS WILL YOU STEVEN?

School days are only happy if you have a particular yen to be taught five hours of geography a week by a convicted paedophile. Actually, to be serious, the sex at school was embarrassing. You’d think after 20 years the janitor would know what he’s doing. I still can’t come unless I’m in a small dark room filled with sports equipment.

There’s that amazing cliché that schooldays are the best days of your life. Things have gone very wrong in your life if your best days involved being shouted at by an alcoholic for spelling ‘broccoli’ with two i’s. Anyone who had the best time of their life at school has never licked LSD off what they think used to be a hooker. To be fair I didn’t hate everything about school. I only hated the teachers, the pupils, the lessons, the building, the food, the smell, every second I spent there – but I have to say the driveway was sort of OK.

The journey to secondary school involved taking a bus and then walking for a couple of miles. The walk always had the sun hanging directly in front of me – the Mayans couldn’t have aligned this thing any more directly with the fucking sun. When it had been raining there would be puddles reflecting the light up into your eyes and it felt like walking into the belly of a spacecraft.

Our school was a zoo for children. On my first day I sat shell-shocked at the side of the playground, a complex ballet of dead-arms, gambling, taunts and violence. At one end were railings surrounding a deep staircase into the basement. This was the ‘grog pit’. If someone’s bag could be got off them it would be hurled down these steps. If they went down to fetch it, an animal howl of ‘GROG PIT!’ would go up and the whole school would crowd up onto the railings and spit on them. I saw a tiny first year emerge to jeers, wet and slippery like a newborn calf. I instantly knew that my task for the next five years was to get through this.

Later I found that a big part of surviving was to get yourself a 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’d never 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.