Oh jesus the accent
I completely forgot about this but it was the most pressing thing on my mind for about the 5 years I was at high school.

If anyone wants to look for the most racist, narrow minded and hate-filled demographic in the country then look no further than your local primary/high school kids. It's growing up and society that eventually forces the idea that "Intolerance is bad m'kay?"

But when kids are young, they're tribal and pick up on the cues from their parents. What adults treat as friendly rivalry is mistakenly interpreted as something much more serious and often violent.

I had a really fucked up upbringing when it came to nationality. I have a Scottish surname and a Scottish father (who is guilty of some of the worst enforcement of that "friendly rivalry" I mentioned above). I was born in England and have an English mother. Owing to my father being in the army my family moved around all over the UK (England and Scotland) as well as Europe - I obtained what's known as the Forces Accent i.e. I sound like I'm from the south of England.

So when my father left the army the family settled back home to Scotland. I read volumes of Oor Wullie and The Broons to understand the local lingo (seriously, a lot of the turns of phrase and words used are quite educational). I think at the time I would have found it difficult going to any school because I skipped a year so was shorter than most of my classmates, very bright and didn't realise this wasn't something to shout about. What I'm trying to say is that I would probably have been every hard kid's punching bag regardless of any nationality confusion.

But as it was I was labelled as English. My friends I hung about with at lunchtime actually gave me the nickname English (these were the guys who treated me the best as well). My life was hell - a daily dose of casual violence and racism from everyone in my class. England beat Scotland in the Five Nations (as it used to be), that'll be me getting fucked over during rugby this week then.

Thankfully the family moved again 6 months later to another part of Scotland. By this time however I had mastered a Scottish accent beyond just speaking like Oor Wullie in an English accent. I still got a bit of hassle at the new school for reasons I mentioned above (short, intelligent) but not being so flagrantly English meant that I faced nowhere near as much grief.

My parents hated me speaking in a Scottish accent though and would stop me from doing so in front of them. I had to work constantly for years to keep my worlds from colliding, always making sure my friends didn't see any of my family. I had to mumble through conversations when they did.

I left school as soon as I could at 16 to go to uni (also in Scotland). Immediately I found myself around a group of people where there was nothing shameful in sounding English. It was such a novelty and relief to be able to be myself for the first time since I was 11.

For years I tried not to think about my nationality or actually analyze who I was. If pushed I said I was British. My dad for years drilled into my sister and I that Scotland was the greatest country in the world so I irrationally wanted to be Scottish but my hatred of all the Scottish kids I met at school held me back.

What finally settled it for me was a random trip south of the border for my gran's funeral. I hadn't been to England for several years but once there meeting all the English side of the family I realised that emotion didn't enter into it. The country felt different, slightly alien. Not in a bad way but I knew for the first time in my life I was definitely Scottish*. Scotland was and still is my home. I sound as English today as I ever have despite having spent most of my life in Scotland. As much as I love my country I hate the small mindedness of it, I hate the ingrained racism that's everywhere because of the chip on the shoulder that most of us have against the English.

Even today when I'm back home - I live in the east of England so don't get back north of the border very often - I sometimes put on my fake yet perfectly convincing Scottish accent when buying a paper or getting on a bus. It still sometimes annoys me that strangers won't immediately realise I'm Scottish unless I sound like I am. But as much as I hate the racism I encountered as a boy I know it's not representative of everyone so I find myself doing it less these days.

But if you happen to be in a pub in Cambridge when a game featuring the Scottish fitba' team is being shown and there's a drunkard at the bar slurring "O Flower of Scotland" and "Get it up yez, ye English bastards!"... do come and say hello to me, I'll probably buy you a pint and tell you how it won't taste as good as a pint of Tennents**.

* - Anyone who laughs at Jonathan Watson's "Heh heh heh" impression of Chick Young or loves Jack, Victor and Navid from Still Game gets Scottish culture enough to be Scottish in my book.
** - We know it's pish yet we still drink it
( djtrialprice, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 16:12, 9 replies)

Even sadder than kids trying to fit in at school
is teachers doing it.

I won't name the guy (but you're a fat, Scottish maths teacher nicknamed "Scooby Doo", this one's for you...), but we had to put up with one of our teachers pathetically trying to be 'one of the lads', for reasons best known to himself.

Specifically, a small group of us were into rock and metal music, leaving Kerrang and Terrorizer lying around the 6th for common room, and Scooby decided that he liked metal music too. It was becoming painfully clear that all his "knowledge" came from the aforementioned copies of Kerrang - anyone who reads that rag knows that the bands they cover are entirely dictated by hype rather than whether the bands in question are any good.

This, obviously, was quite irritating, so we took it to its next logical and entertaining step: making bands up and entertaining ourselves by asking his opinion of them - to his credit his bullshit skills were impressive:

"Hello sir, have you heard the new Skullcrusher album?"
"Yes, yes I have."
"What did you make of it?"
"Well, I know that kind of music isn't for everyone, but I thought it was pretty good. I liked the first track."
"'Bleeding for Jesus'?"
"That's the one. Really aggressive."
"But that one's a slow instumental."
"Oh yeah, that's right. I meant the second track."
"Oh, right, 'Corpse Parade'. The one with the guitar solo."
"Yeah, that's it, wicked guitar solo."
"I thought the guitar solo sucked."
"Well, maybe you don't have my taste for good guitar playing."
"Are you sure? He made it by vomiting on his guitar and attacking it with a circular saw."
"Yes, well maybe you kids are too young to remember some of the more avant-garde stuff - he's referencing Jimi Hendrix."
"Actually, sir, there's no such band as Skullcrusher. We made them up."
"Yes there is."
"Really, there isn't."
"I've heard of them, even if you haven't"...

Pathetic. Get some friends your own age.
(Axeman Jim, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 15:21, 5 replies)

I gave a complete stranger a blowjob.
Honestly, I don't know who came over me.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 14:31, 3 replies)

Cred Destroyer
I never fitted in, and I'm so damn proud of it.

I went to this rather safe, upper-middle class CofE High school in North Yorkshire, populated by some very pleasant but still rather personally repressed individuals. Thrust into this environment after the safe confines of a local village school, I quickly realised that aspiring to be one of the "cool" kids was a complete waste of effort and would carry with it few benefits anyway.

Instead I made a point of being as "different" as possible. Whilst all teenagers were obsessed with how they looked and conforming to a fashion style, I ignored it and wore what I wanted how I wanted. Whilst everyone else was obsessed with looking cool and listening to the right bands and being seen in the right places in town, I unashamedly brandished a love of cheesy pop music, danced around with joy if I felt like it and didn't care how many teachers I had a good relationship with.

In short, I was different, because that defined me far more than any sense of belonging would ever have done. Sometimes it meant friendships were a struggle, as you could see the people I was mates with fighting an internal battle between getting along with me really well and the potential for all their credibility to be wiped out in an instant if they were seen talking to me.

It all meant I was launched into the outside world with a personality, an enthusiastic sense of individuality and completely lacking in fear of being looked at, exposed or otherwise subject to scrutiny. It meant I was able to develop a career as an entertainer, working in high profile media roles, developing a small measure of fame and making sure that I made a difference to the lives of people just by being myself.

So I didn't fit in. I worked hard not to, and it made me a far far better and happier person that I might otherwise have become.
(TalkbackStuck making obscene phonecalls since, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 14:29, 17 replies)

Ah yes, accents
I'd forgotten about that. Not many people know this, but I am originally from Norfolk. Which, as many people know, has a rather odd accent. When my family moved North up to Yorkshire, our belongings weren't the only thing to come with us. I brought my accent as well.

An accent which was pure broad Norfolk, and if I wasn't 5 years old, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between me and a local farmer strolling the boundaries of his fields with a shotgun waiting to yell "'Ere you! Orf moy larnd!" at any miscreant who dared breach his bush.

So, now having the accent described, imagine carrying this North to Sheffield. Not a place known for being exactly the most tolerant of places in the 1980s. Especially in school, and as we all know, kids can be right little bastards, and the ones in my school were no exception. The usual insults of "Farmer Giles" abounded, and I learned very quickly kids lack in two important areas- being kind to others, and originality. I tried to imitate the accent, oh I tried, but it just sounded false. So, instead, I modified my accent to my dulcet tones of today- i.e. no accent whatsoever.

It's a shame really, but every now and then I do catch myself dropping into my old accent, or I am being asked to do it by the more backward colleagues of mine on my desk. That stopped after a while, probably because I started swearing, a lot. But these days, I still have not been able to imitate the Yorkshire accent, or any of the local dialects. Barnsley? A complete lost cause. Sheffield accent? Oh dear... the last time I tried imitating a Yorkshire accent, I sounded like Peter Kaye, and I have no wish to sound like a 2nd-rate comedian who obsesses over garlic bread. So, back to this...

Oddly enough though, when I went to uni in Warrington I picked up the accent no trouble. I don't use it mind, because it sounds like the unholy union of Scouse and Manc- and no-one wants that.
( jim_bob can herd cats., Mon 19 Jan 2009, 13:45, 4 replies)

Mistaken Identity
ScousersPets' post reminded me of my own experience.

I spent the first six years of my life in Aberdeen, and acquired a very, very broad accent (so much so that when my Dad went down to London for work and the rest of us spent a year at my Grandma's in Inverness before joining him, I was sent to elocution lessons because no-one in Inverness - reputed for the clarity of its accent - could understand me).

That wasn't so bad, but then we moved down to London a year later and I started primary school there.

It was bad enough that I was effectively a year ahead of all the other kids in my class (primary school in Scotland starting at age four) and so came across as a bit of a teacher's pet/smartarse, but my Scottish accent also marked me out as being different.

Except the thick little twunts couldn't identify it as a Scottish accent, they thought it was Irish.

Now, this was at the height of the IRA bombing campaign in the early 1970s and, given that all the catholic Irish kids in the area went to the local Roman Catholic school, I was marked out as the only "Irish" kid in the school.

So, despite my protestations that "I'm no' Irish, I'm Scottish!" I would get regular beatings from bigger kids for being a Fenian, Paddy or whatever, particularly whenever the IRA hit the headlines with a new bombing.

Eventually, to fit in and to get the beatings to stop, I ended up speaking with an English accent like everyone else (although a lot of people even today find it impossible to place where I'm from).

One unexpected side-effect of this is that many years later I almost got beaten up in Edinburgh by a couple of brain-dead squaddies for being "an English bastard".

Sometimes you just can't win...

Length? About 18 months till the accent was gone, I think.
(Capo, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 13:31, Reply)

Simple really...
...I don't.
(emadex thinks the world will end on, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 13:24, 1 reply)

I could have been a chav...
Many years ago when I was at a beautifully shite secondary school, I was about 12 or 13, and having absolutely no knowledge of the world, and being a complete loner, gave me the gift of complete naivety.

So one lunchtime I was on me todd and thinking up ways of getting in with the cool crowd. I would get one of them gold shiney rings with a coin on it! That would instantly give me kudos and access to the cool club.

Luckily, my mom refused to buy me a sovereign ring, and I grew up rather nicely, where as the cool crew I so wanted to belong to are still the same crew and do all the same things but with many babies attached to them.

Nice
(Beacon, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 13:01, 1 reply)

Losing my religion...
As my screen name implies, I grew up in Liverpool. I want to a normal (if slightly right-wing Catholic) primary school, so i had a normal Scouse accent. I then got a grant to go to a posh, public school 95% of the kids there had had their places bought for them by their parents, I was in the remaining 5% who had got in by being smart enough. What I realised I had to do immediately to fir in was lose my accent. i didn't develop a posh-kid voice, I just started talking properly, with as little accent as I could manage. I would then bring back the Scouseosity when playing footie with my mates outside school.

My accent came back when I left school and started working. Right up until I was 20 and got a job in Banbury, at6 which point the accent disapppeared again and has basically gone ever since - though I'm stuick in this kind of limbo where anyone from outside Liverpool works out I'm Scouse fairly quickly, but other Scousers will ask me where I'm from.

Oh and whenever anyone I don't know, outside Liverpool, asks me what team i support, I nearly kill my dad with shame and say "Everton". No-one gives a shit about the bluenoses...
(ScousersPet, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 12:53, 5 replies)

Fitting in at it's worst
This one is pretty hard on me as it relates to the time I spent in the army, a time I would personally rather forget.

In the army you have no real choice but to fit in, and any differences are either beaten out of you by the CO’s or your fellow trainees.

Our squad had a person that seemed to tick all the boxes when it came to not fitting in (and I am glad to say it wasn’t me) he was overweight, out of shape and had little to no social skills, for the sake of my anonymity I will just call him P.

From the start of training the poor sod got the worst treatment imaginable (basic training is no walk in the park itself but they were extra hard on this guy). His constant inability to correctly follow instructions made the drill instructor decide to come down on him even harder, at first our instructor thought that if I could mentor him he may change his ways and fit in (I had got my head down and worked hard and had become the squad leader by then). For a while it all looked like it would work out P improved a little, with the odd fuck up.

He then landed himself in more hot water and our whole squad was punished as a result. The idea of punishing us all for his mistakes then continued, as our instructor decided that it may be better to use the whole "get the squad against the target to make him either shape up or ship out" mentality.

This new rule resulted in P becoming very unpopular and culminated in him having a blanket party one night (AKA hold him down in his bed with a blanket and beat the crap out of him with socks/ towels filled with soap bars or any other hard object you can get your hands on) where I admit that due to peer pressure I also gave him a good whack too.

Strangely enough the plan seemed to do the trick and P’s performance rapidly improved. He even managed to pass the final exam to become a marine… Sadly he then went and ruined it all on our last night of training by blowing the head off of the drill instructor and then taking his own life in the same toilet block. It took me hours to clean up the mess left. Gomer Pyle R.I.P.

(Big thanks to Mr Twisty Cheeky for the idea.)
(mon bison powered by magnets, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 12:16, 8 replies)

I've had plastic surgery
I prefer saying this on the internet, because this way I can't see your disbelieving looks of "Really, that's how you look *after* you cheat"
(teebie jeebie, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 11:23, 1 reply)

Oh, have a Grief Junkie tale of the sort I detest:
Apparently this is Blue Monday, the worst Monday of the year.

Yesterday my so-rocky-it's-Rocky-VI-Rocky-Balboa relationship went tits up. A steamy year of fabulous manic adventure, hot sex and hideous subconscious mind games finally imploded when a minor, trivial thing like him sending explicit messages to women online, from my phone, when I was in the room, pushed me over the edge (I would have been fine with the messages, and even the phone and the room bit, except for the fact that he used to send those dirty, filthy messages to me, but hasn't for the past month or so).

Anyway, this led to confrontation and wrangling and arguing over a much bigger picture - the picture where he claims he does not do love, or caring, or big emotions, and I refuse to stifle mine.

To keep it on topic, what have I done to fit in? Well, after about nine or ten months of sexual monogamy (and twas him insisting on the monogamy) I, in the afterglow of a particularly good bout of sheet-tangling fun and an orgasm that had me screaming like a howler monkey, said happily, "you know I care about you, don't you?". He went silent. Utterly silent. Not a word. He stayed silent for 12 hours, all through my pleading with him to speak, my ranting and my subsequent talking at him. When he did finally speak, he told me I was being sentimental. What did I do to fit in? I apologised for caring about him. I spent the next few months maintaining that I didn't care, all the while secretly, willfully caring. Bear in mind, this was not merely some fuck buddy thing where I transgressed the boundaries - this was to all intents a normal boyfriend-girlfriend relationship in everything but name.

Yesterday I whispered the words in his ear that he's always wanted to hear: "I'm not in love with you". Then I laughed really loudly and really genuinely because I meant it. I hope it burst his eardrum.



[Disclaimer: he's not a complete asshole, I just sometimes make him sound like one. There's no malice in him.]
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 10:51, 25 replies)

I have to take tablets for epilepsy..
I once fitted in my bedroom.
(TheRiddler Hmmmmm... I concur., Mon 19 Jan 2009, 10:26, Reply)

Back in the day
when everyone was dying the the hair framing their face blonde, I had very dark, nearly waist-length hair. And I wanted to fit in.

So I dyed the two front strips of my hair, either side of my be-spectacled, acne-ridden teenage face. With Sun-In. The hair didn't turn an exciting and remarkable shade of sun-kissed blonde. It turned Bright. Ginger.

I got laughed at. Didn't stop me doing stuff to try and be accepted though. More of that anon.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 10:18, 5 replies)

I swore at a colleague every day
because everyone else was doing it... Only a couple of years later I found out that the colleague in question did not appreciate it.

But at least I fitted in the group!
(Bassie999, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 9:41, Reply)

I'm
so bad at fitting in that if I fell into a barrel of tits I'd come out sucking my thumb....


Cheers

What?
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 9:32, 7 replies)

Fitting in?
Never yet managed it. In fact I am so bad at fitting in that if a bored alien dropped me into a room with a dozen exact clones of myself I'd still end up in the Wallflower Corner.
Fuck it. I prefer books anyway.
(Big D, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 8:39, Reply)

Plastic Surgery - too much?
Axel was one of the nicest guys on my landing at University. He was on a secondment from the University of Gothenburg, where he was taking something terribly cosmopolitan like 'EEC Studies' or somesuch, and - unlike most Scandinavians - he was terribly, painfully shy.

Still, after he'd understood why we sung the theme tune from Beverly Hills Cop everytime he walked down the corridor, he became one of the lads, joined in the all-night sessions of Championship Manager and necked beers with the best of us. He spoke better English than anyone on the corridor (especially because fate had lumped us with three Sports Scientists, and...well, let's say I'm glad I don't have a qualification in Games)

He was still very self-conscious, no more so than about his figure. Axel was comfortably six-foot-eight in his stockinged feet and rangy as a beanpole, and no amount of Worthingtons Creamflow and late-night curries seemed to do anything to change that. Plus, he had a rather unfortunate facial feature. His nose. It was - to put it mildly - fucking freakishly horrible. And Axel, I'm sorry if you're reading this, but I think those were your words after the infamous February 20th tequila session. More on that another time...

Anyway, this nose. Well, imagine a cock. Make it a MSPaint magenta cock with thick black hairs if you like. Imagine somebody had broken it. Twice. Once each way. And then imagine somebody else had stuck a bicycle pump up the end and inflated it (laterally) to about twice its original size. That was Axel's nose, bless him.

We did our best to help him out and find him a quiet gentle young girl who would give him a proper welcome to Blighty, but he always used get jittery and claim his height, his skinniness and his nose were just making him stand out from the crowd, and retreat back home. We felt genuinely sorry for the chap; it wasn't his fault, after all, and we were making a concerted effort to boost his self-confidence.

Anyway, after several failed attempts in all the tackiest parts of Birmingham (and it takes a while to find them all, let me assure you), Axel came down the corridor one morning in unusually high spirits. 'Whooping' might be a touch melodramatic for this staid Northern European; let's just say he was a bit boistrous. It was about 10:30am and naturally we were all still in bed.

"Lads! Lads!" he was hollering. "Come and look at this!"

Bleary-eyed and tucking willies back in where they should not be seen, we staggered out onto the landing to see Axel brandishing an A5 flyer. The sort that you see literally by the million wherever students congregate.

This flyer was advertising cut-rate aesthetic surgery. In Longbridge.

In FUCKING LONGBRIDGE?

I'm sure many of you know that Longbridge is scarcely the well-heeled suburb in which to have a discreet tummy-tuck.

Like some awful unfunny comedy act, we all stood there in our pants and looked in slow-motion at the flyer, then at Axel's great conk, then back at the flyer again....

"Don't be ridiculous..."

"Where'll you get the money...?"

"It's dangerous...."

"....fucking LONGBRIDGE?..."

Well, we knew money wasn't an issue. Axel had come loaded with Gothenburg's equivalent of Bond's expense account. But did he really want to go to these drastic lengths to be one of the guys?

"I do, and I will!" he stated triumphantly. An then, ominously but even more triumphantly: "And I want all you guys to be there when it happens..."

It was getting fucking cold standing around in this corridor in our boxers, so we all turned round and slammed our doors, leaving him standing there alone like a pathetic and dejected Peter Crouch.

Thankfully, it turned out that we didn't have to watch the operation, but we did accompany Axel down to a dodgy little back-alley behind KFC (note to self - don't eat there until their supply certificate is renewed), and watch a huge butch doctor, with the muscles of Larry Fishburne and the voice of Julian Clary, guide Axel through what I can only describe as a nose catalogue. We cringed as he took the measurements - height, breadth, depth, the whole works. We frowned as Axel tried on this horrific nasal guide and the Doc held up all sorts of pathetic looking prostheses. And we yelped as the big man waved a scalpel and a felt tip about simultaneously with one hand, barely millimetres away from our friend's eyeball.

Two weeks later, he went back, was put to sleep and woke up shortly afterwards with a brand new facial appendage. No fuss; no bother. He claimed we were over-reacting.

A bit too much, even for a 'One Time Only! Less-Than-A-Grand Offer!', was still our considered opinion, but it didn't stop Axel picking up a sweet young student nurse a couple of months later and spending lots of jolly time with her and her uniform. So, I suppose it was worth it.

But that's the last time I go to a Thin Swede Hooter Fitting.

(For fuck's sake! What's wrong with me? Haven't I got anything else to do with my time?)
( ousgg is not seeking approval, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 8:16, 8 replies)

Open & Grab
Fell in for a while with a bad lot at my primary school.

One of the ways they passed the time was to check the doors of parked cars until they found one that was unlocked, then open it and grab what they could and run like hell.

Of course, I knew it was wrong (and pretty mindless too - what was the point in grabbing an eight-track cassette (this was the early 1970s) when none of us had access to an eight-track player?

It all came to an end one fateful day when, in a badly-lit car park, we opened a car door and woke up the rather large person who had been having a snooze in the passenger seat.

We learnt a few new words as he chased us down the street.

Length? About half a mile until he gave up...
(Capo, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 7:54, Reply)

clothing.
i cut my hair, got a labret piercing and amped up the baggy jeans and tshirt collection in my wardrobe, so people would believe i was gay.
i don't have what you would call a 'commanding physical presence' so it looked comical. i also wept at my lak of style, make up and general girlyness. so i went back into dresses and heels and grew my hair.

not that it matters, either way i can't get a girlfriend! yeesh.
(charlottebronte stalking through the moors, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 7:08, Reply)

i pretended to love
that 'Pandora' jewellery that everyone has now. they're kind of like a silver rope bracelet/necklace that you put metal 'beads' onto. i think they look like ass but did i say this? no.
thus, on my 21st, i recieved a Pandora necklace. i look like a twat wearing it.


well, this isn't the 'i started crack' story of drama and woe, but i did want to post something because said 21st is actually today. it's my birthday, woo!
(charlottebronte stalking through the moors, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 7:02, 5 replies)

First smoked weed to impress a girl
And it worked, got her into bed later on cus she was there to witness my gateway to manhood.

Bit of a depressing story now I think about it. Especially when she turned out to be a total fucking loon, and my mate failed to tell me that when he set us up. Then again I should have realised when all it took to get her in the sack was a toke on a spliff in my friend's dingy piss-smelling room.
(Stu in the hat is frothing at the gash, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 2:40, Reply)

We had run out of condoms
so I greased my one-eyed rat kitten with cherry flavoured lip-balm.
( stopmeandslapme Cometh the hour, cometh your mum, Sun 18 Jan 2009, 23:39, 1 reply)

Football crazy, football mad
I play superstar football at a top Italian Serie A team (well, actually, we're third from the top.) They love me and I've won all sorts, but...

In order to fit in with my mate and countryman 'Robi' (and scoop up a shedload of moolah,) I've agreed to sign with a shit English team who are loaded but are at the arse end of the premiership. I know deep down they'll never get in the champions league or win anything but i just wanted to fit in with 'Robi' and his gang (and get a shedload of moolah.)

I can't help thinking though that people will just think I'm a greedy twat who is wasting his god-given talent for the sake of a load sad Mancs (and a shed-load of moolah.)

But 'Robi' made me do it!
(fergus the bogeyman Beware of geeks bearing gifs!, Sun 18 Jan 2009, 22:50, Reply)

My Story
As a younger man, I worked in law enforcement. I was part of a special task force set up to combat the more extreme side of criminal behaviour.

My particular unit was of great interest to local politicians, who would often seek to ally themselves, in the public eye, with these proud upholders of justice. One in particular was an older statesman (I won't give his name here), with some power and influence. He took quite a liking to me, and would often invite me to his office to discuss where my career was going.

From the start, I suspected there was something amiss with all this, but he was kind to me and often gave me sage advice when I shared my troubles. In spite of my occasional misgivings, I looked up to him.

Some time into our friendship, I discovered he was implicated in a criminal enterprise - one which was being investigated by my own colleagues. I didn't know what to do. After some serious thought, I decided the best thing to do was cut off Samuel L. Jackson's arm and kill all the Jedi kids.

I sometimes wonder if I did the right thing, but... you can't go back.
(Sir Harrington Titsmith disgraced himself on, Sun 18 Jan 2009, 22:30, Reply)

Trying to fit it in whilst batting for the other side.
When I was at secondary school all my mates were beginning to 'get to know' a group of girls from a nearby school and at the weekends much adolescent fumbling was taking place (with predictably differing levels of expertise and success rates.)

The weekend finally arrived where I was included for the first time and we set off to a party where it had been arranged that each of us would partner a young lady for the evening in a snogathon. By this stage everyone except me had previously (at the very least) got into someone's knickers and begun to get acquainted with female anatomy whereas I was completely clueless.

What I hadn't told my mates as we headed off to the party was that I had developed over the years a much greater attraction to male anatomy than female. The latter was a mystery I didn't really want to unravel.

However, I duly found myself determinedly snogging a girl who was singularly ill-equipped to raise my 'interest,' (lacking as she was in the willy department.) I knew I was supposed to attempt entry to her lower underwear though I was secretly hoping she would make it a no-go area. Unfortunately for me she showed no resistance at all and once I got past the underwear barrier I quite simply didn't know what to do. This soon became embarrasingly apparent to her also and she suddenly asked me whether I really fancied her. I could only say 'No, not really.'

'Well who do you fancy then?' she asked. Without thinking I blurted out the truth just at the moment the music stopped... 'Dave!'

Time stood still as 12 pairs of eyes focused first on me, then on my best mate Dave.

It's a funny thing but I never saw much of Dave after I left school. But you know, if you're out there Dave...
(Ivor Biggin, Sun 18 Jan 2009, 22:25, Reply)

Four syllables.
K.Y. Jelly.
(Generator cannot be named for legal reasons, Sun 18 Jan 2009, 22:04, 3 replies)

I Smoked Some Drugs (And The Drugs Won)
When I was sixteen, I was not good with drugs. I had hardly even touched them, in fact, and so it was with great trepidation that, on a cold November's eve, sitting in an abandoned hotel gazebo, I took from an acquaintance the proffered joint.

"It'll be okay," I told myself. "It's just pot. It's not proper drugs. This'll get me some cred."

Reader, I smoked it. I felt ill, but it passed. I felt dizzy, but this too passed. I began to laugh, and eventually this also passed.

Then later on I threw up on a girl's breasts and fell down the stairs, but don't tell anyone.
(Sir Harrington Titsmith disgraced himself on, Sun 18 Jan 2009, 20:22, 4 replies)

I quite like staying alive
In my younger days, saying the first thing that came into my head would often get me smacked. As I've grown up, I've got better at the non-committal courteous response.

If you meet me IRL, here's a translation:

"Really?" = "Fuck off".

"That's interesting" = "Fuck off, you boring cunt"

"I wouldn't have thought it possible" = "Fuck off you lying bastard"

"Are you sure that's right?" = "I just told you to fuck off, you lying bastard"

"That's a valid point of view" = "Fuck off, you're wrong"

"Not quite my cup of tea" = "Jesus, what a fucking awful way to waste money/brain cells/time"

"I'm always open to opinion" = "But not yours, you dismal fucking windowlicker"

"I'm terribly sorry, I don't think that's quite right" = "FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF!"
(all my scars face forward possesses 2.5% of a hyperalloy combat chassis, Sun 18 Jan 2009, 20:06, 2 replies)

a ftting anecdote of fitting in
Back when I was a young teen, and beginning to find "punk" - my limited wardrobe and emerging belief system didn't quite correlate - so I combined them.

At the time, I saw nothing wrong in wearing a brand of press-stud based, three-striped tracksuit bottoms and a wallet chain hanging from my right pocket.

As time went by, and my image changed to match with how I felt, I grew a rather large mohican and purchased a Coal Chamber hoodie, with the ironic slogan "Don't be afraid to be different" on the back.

My drinking habits were also affected, instead of urine based ciders, I preferred Scotsmac and QC, and anything I could get my hands on.

I changed my appearance to fit in with these people, because they were more interesting than the 'tingers' as we so called them, before 'chav' hit our locale.

Not long after, I decided that charity shops were the way forward, and have happily purchased all my clothing from them for the past 8 years, and have no intention of stopping
(Davethefan began lurking again on or around, Sun 18 Jan 2009, 18:16, Reply)