I was actually a bright pupil - voted “most likely to succeed” and achieved pretty much straight As throughout secondary school (I know right… what happened?). For 4 years I also dated the most popular guy in school and was *probably* the envy of most of my classmates. Yet as cool as I thought I was, looking back I made some monumental schoolgirl errors - all whilst sporting a skirt that barely covered my bum, lips coated in Rimmel’s Heather Shimmer and dangerously overplucked eyebrows.

With Dex now one step closer to entering the acne-ridden world of school himself, I’ve been reliving some of my most mortifying school memories. Sit back and get ready to cringe…

The remote control incident

Nothing made you happier as 90s schoolkid than walking into a classroom and seeing that one of these monstrosities had been wheeled in:

Yep, the TV and VCR combo meant an easy lesson and a distracted teacher for at least an hour. It didn’t matter if we were being played a BBC production of Romeo & Juliet or a documentary on China’s one-child policy - TV lessons were just about the coolest things to happen to you at school.

Being the rebel I was, upon discovering the school had the same model VCR as we did at home, I pinched my parent’s remote control in what was to be perhaps the most long-awaited prank in school history. I was to wait until the next time our teacher was sporting a hangover and needed a darkened classroom full of silent children and technology to do her job for her.

After months of waiting, finally my moment came and Miss Mercer informed us we’d be watching a documentary on where babies come from. Before pressing play she went to great lengths to tell us that she wouldn’t tolerate any giggling and we were to wait until the end to ask questions. Perfect time to whip out the remote!

The video was full of the usual drivel adults feed you about sex - “When a man and woman love each other very much” etc - but there was a cartoon of a couple copulating under the bedsheets that was probably the most risque thing we’d been exposed to at aged 11. As this bit inevitably got the most giggles, it was this bit I rewound and replayed… over and over again.

Every time, Miss Mercer would get up, eject the cassette and give it a shake before putting it back on again. The video would resume playing and I’d rewind right on back to the sexy bit. The same dance went on for some 10 glorious minutes and I gained some serious admiration from my mates. I’d have totally got away with it too, had it not been for one child who proceeded to grass me up after an argument over boyfriends one lunch-time.

A letter home and 2 weeks of detentions for that little stunt.

Lost in translation

I clench a little every time I think of this.

At school, you understand, your vocabulary swells and inflates quickly. You end up using these words either eloquently or apathetically for the rest of your life - let’s face it many of us have winced over a colleague’s improper use of their, they’re or there. Yet fortunately for me, English was one of my stronger subjects, and good grades came easily enough. Essays on Return of the Native or King Lear were laden with commentary on catharsis, pathetic-fallacy and nods to the socio-economic context in which they were written. In short, I knew my stuff.

Yet for all the grandiose words Mrs Archer taught us, I was also learning new words from my classmates - the sort you’re more likely to hear from me today (and the sort I seriously hope my own kids use a little less publicly).

So one day, when outrageously flirting with my maths teacher (despite his New Balance trainers, he rode a motorbike which elevated him to James Dean-like status) in front of the entire class I playfully hit him with the C Bomb. I remember clearly his eyebrows narrowed and his whole demeanor changed.

In fairness, I hadn’t actually meant to disgrace myself or insult him. In my mind, cu$t was playful, inoffensive and U-rated, like prat. When it was obvious to him that the severity of what I had said was lost on me, he asked me to both repeat it and tell the class what it meant. After stumbling my way through a pretty ineffectual explanation, he proceeded to tell me its more anatomical meaning. It seemed I’d effectively called the sexiest teacher in school a walking vagina.

I might have hoped that his anger would dilute down to bemusement, but it didn’t. I got a week’s worth of detentions for that one.

A first kiss made public

Despite being pretty popular, my first proper kiss came later for me than it did for most of mates. Not that they knew this of course. If you had asked them back then, they’d have told you I’d been snogging my hot slightly older neighbour for years. In fact, I was so into this make-believe boyfriend, it gave me the perfect excuse to avoid Spin the Bottle with my classmates.

By aged 12 though, after having a few sips of some lager a group of us had stolen from our dads, curiosity got the better of me. Early evening we crawled under my garden fence and onto our school field. There were real advantages to living so close to school as football pitches were marked out all year round and the teachers generally overlooked us using it if we didn’t leave litter.

And so, sitting in the middle of a tennis pitch of Little Heath Secondary School, an empty bottle of Budweiser decided who I was share my first French kiss with. Wonderfully, it was to be Aaron, a shy but beautiful-looking boy that I’d written the odd poem about in my diary that summer- despite my nerves I leaned in and let him take the lead. What followed was your typical sloppy, mechanical and somewhat frightening first kiss we all end up having at some point in our teens - but to me it was perfect.

So perfect in fact, you might have thought I’d been delighted to discover it had actually been captured, for prosperity’s sake, by the school’s new CCTV system. It seemed our school might have turned a blind eye to children playing the odd game of 5-a-side on school property after the bell had gone, but they weren’t so amenable to drinking on school premises and lewd behaviour.

Some 7 of us were then invited into our Head of Year’s office and had the embarrassing job of assuring her we were only kissing and weren’t regularly exploring each others bodies behind the bike sheds. We might have managed to convince her that she was not going to have to deal with any teen pregnancies that summer, but she wasn’t willing to let us get away with the fact our choice of refreshment that evening had come in 440ml cans. Letters duly went home to our parents and most of us got grounded for a good few weeks.

So there it is - my three most abiding school memories. Technology, bad language and sex - all re-imagined for an adult audience. Come on then, dare you to tell me yours…

This is my entry into the #LVSchoolboyErrors comp via LV=