School Days were most certainly the best
In our little group of friends there was one lad who was obsessed with Oasis. This was around the Britpop era, and so just one mention of Blur would put him in a frenzy. He was trying his hardest to learn to play guitar, but no matter how often we asked, he wouldn't demonstrate. We suspected that he sucked, but in retrospect it was probably a smart move on his part. Kids can be evil.

Anyway, one day we decided to send him a letter from the Oasis fan club. We reckoned if one existed, he would be a member of it and ripe for being a target of teenage pranking. In the letter we told him that he had won a competition to see Oasis live at Wembley, to go backstage and meet the band, and even go to the recording of their new album at Abbey Road.

Although utterly fabricated, that was remarkably prescient as their next album was recorded at Abbey Road and Noel then went through his John Lennon reincarnated phase. Anyway, I digress...

We thoroughly expected him not to fall for it, and we would all have a good laugh about what a crap joke it had been. For one thing, he would surely know he hadn't entered the competition, and for another we had printed the letter on a clapped out dot matrix. Even for the early-to-mid-nineties, this looked utterly shite, even more so considering it was supposed to be representing one of the biggest bands of the decade.

But he fell for it, hook line and sinker. In fact, he wouldn't talk about anything else for days. We had to break it to him, but didn't really know how without really hurting his feelings. We figured if we could find a way to let him down gently, and make him think he had figured out the joke himself all would be right with the world.

So we sent him the concert tickets. Again, shoddily printed, we even included our own names within the text ("sponsored by Captain Skippy's Chips" for example) but to no avail. I expect part of him knew, but refused to accept that he wouldn't be meeting his idols.

When he started bringing it up in class, and boasting to people well above our station about this great opportunity he had been granted, we knew we had to tell him.

He wasn't pleased. He didn't speak with us for weeks, and in fact the whole group dynamic was never really the same again.

I'm sorry James, wherever you are. However there is a little part of me that wishes we had gone all the way, and let him turn up for the concert that didn't exist, or knock on the door of Abbey Road for his appointment with the boys...
(Captain Skippy pooed in a bag and left it on your doorstep, Sat 15 Dec 2007, 19:09, Reply)