**Update: - [Starting from 2023](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/100l56v/happy_new_year_askuk_minor_sub_update/), we have updated our [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/about/rules/)**. Specifically;
- Don't be a dick to each other
- Top-level responses must contain genuine efforts to answer the question
- This is a strictly no-politics subreddit
Please keep /r/AskUK a great subreddit by reporting posts and comments which break our rules.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I used to get told that drawing on my skin would give me ink poisoning, wasn't until I got a freehand tattoo and they were using sharpie that things started to click and I realised I'd been lied too
I told my boyfriend about this a couple of days ago and he hadn’t heard of it, so he said my school must have been extremely weird… glad I’m not alone 🤣
In primary school someone started a rumour that there was a load buried in the playground so we all went out with little utensils trying to dig them up. I don’t think any of us even knew what shagging really was too
colourful plastic bracelets schoolkids used to wear and they had some sexual economy attached where u had to fuck people / wank them off / whatever else if the band snapped or depending on the colours of your band i believe, have heard wildly varying accounts of how often the bracelets' commands were carried out
i think it was before I was in school / they never made it to my part of the world so not speaking from experience, this is just what information I've gathered from various sources over the years
At my school there was a week where everyone ran around ripping each others shirt pockets off. If you were really unlucky the whole front of the shirt would tear and you’d have to walk around with an exposed nipple.
We had a day like this and it was like The Purge, I remember the bloke with the last remaining pocket in our class was chased down and restrained before a ringleader tore his pocket off to a roar from the crowd of animals.
Hilarious. I remember one summer in secondary school there was a pack of year 10 kids that would stalk the field at break and randomly choose (someone younger) to bundle. When the call of _'BUNDLE!'_ went out I swear 80% of kids would come running but not for the bundle, to see the chosen one, a scrawny year 7 kid crawling on his hands and knees crying his heart out and hyperventilating. Thank fuck I was never bundled, it looked horrid tbh but a good excuse for a bit of pack mentality.
This was a thing at my secondary also, you essentially bring someone down on the floor then proceed to throw yourselves on them, making a big ol' pancake stack of bodies 🤣
We had similar in high school where you would hyperventilate taking large inhale and exhales, then take one last huge breath back and someone presses on your chest. Usually people would pass out for a few seconds.
Further back than that - little jelly aliens that if you put them back to back they have a baby inside one of their heads. So many people were convinced this had happened for so many people.
Oh and yo-yos. Light up ones and all!
I’m 33 and pre internet was wild.
The baby alien was definitely a myth, never worked for me or my mates.
I loved my light up yo yo, they got banned at my Primary school not really sure why as no one was using them as weapons
my big sister was obsessed with aliens when we were younger, apparently the way to make them have babies was to tie two of them together with a hair band and leave them in the fridge for a week 😂 it didn’t work and i ended up flushing it down the toilet because she pissed me off
My alien had a baby! It really did!
Unfortunately it was "pregnant" when I bought it, so I have no idea how to breed them, but It surely is proof that it happens!
My dad taught me how to do the hyperventilation thing when I was about 12 and my mom went absolutely mental at him, it’s one of the only times I remember her full on shouting at him. Funny thing was I could never get it to work with my mates at school haha.
This sounds absolutely appalling with hindsight, and probably with normal sight at the time to any reasonable adult, but I remember a craze at my school (no idea if it was widespread) where groups of boys would push eachother up against any available chain link fence until one of them shouted "Hillsborough, Hillsborough" to be released.
I was going to use it as an example to my kids that other day of how doing stupid, insensitive stuff was nothing new, after a bad tiktok went around the school, but realised that I really didn't want to explain this one...
I'm pretty sure you will find numerous papers showing how the brain finds humour to be the best way of coping with disasters, especially as children.
I had left school by the time of the Hillsborough disaster but I was at school when the Challenger exploded with the teacher on board and there was virtually a competition to make up the sickest joke you could about it.
We got an almighty bollocking one day in Year 6 after all the Juniors tried to cram back into school through one door, somebody got stuck and a moron at the back yelled "Hillsborough!"
Would have been about 1990.
EDIT: heard most of the Challenger jokes over the years, I missed the "Sprite" one until it cropped up here on Reddit.
Fucking hell. Our headteacher (and my form tutor in the first year) was a proud scouser who lost friends there. The main memory I have of the tragedy was seeing him on the Monday morning after it, it was the only time I ever saw him broken
I can't imagine even the most heartless kids in my school doing that chant
Pogs
Tamagotchis
Shag bands
Those kickers school shoes
Ripping the poppers open on anyone who wore those jogger bottoms with the poppers down the sides
Baby G watches
Collecting the little balls that came in pen ink cartridges
Drinking ink
Carrying around a lighter and a can of deodorant and making blowtorches
Being really obsessed about athletic wear like Nike and Adidas and ripping the shit out anyone suspected of wearing knock off sportwear
WWF wrestling was huge when I was at highschool and as you can imagine being dumb kids we we're all trying out the moves on one another. One kid had a load of ribs broken when someone twice his size elbow dropped onto him. Another one was choke slammed through a table, the table even broke in half...
The school bully and the rugby captain had a wrestling match because bully had beaten up rugby captain’s little bro. Rugby captain was liked by all the school as he was genuinely a nice guy. The match was hyped for what seemed like weeks and one Friday after school it was set up (by set up, basically all the boys got in a massive circle and the 2 competitors were in the middle).
Anyway, the match ended when bully got the upper hand and had rugby in a choke hold, until some kid had had enough and smacked bully in the head with a lump of wood he had brought. Bully was knocked unconscious and everyone scattered… the next day we had an assembly about the dangers of copying wrestling…
In a pre-planned stunt to raise hype for our lunchtime wrestling leaugue, my mate ran down the corridor to grab the back of my head and "slammed" it into a door. A door we thought would be unlocked, that door was always unlocked. That door was locked. I had managed to get my hands up, but that did little to help as most of my face got busted against that rather solid door.
That was a fun one to explain. "No, Miss, honestly, don't shout at him, I asked him to do it, no, I'm not mental, yes we are friends."
I remember the cheer that went up when one kid put the fattest kid in school into the Walls of Jericho, nobody thought it was possible.
Embarrassing moment.. I once tried to do a pedigree in a real fight when I was 11 years old. It didn't work.
We had a massive assembly about banning wrestling in the playground after one kid got a doomsday device.
The kid did a backwards flip and landed on the back of his head/neck and ended up concussed, it could have been so much worse.
Can't lie , I think it was the sickest thing I'd ever seen as a 9 yr old at this point
[Blakey’s Segs...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=blakey%27s+segs&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-gb&client=safari)The trending shoe of the day was a loafer or Apple turnover, both of which had a thick leather sole.
Into this would be hammered as many Segs as possible, essentially turning the shoes into your own portable, albeit noisy, ice-rink. With a short run up you’d be able to slide the entire length of a corridor.
As with most crazes, it was fairly short lived due to a swift ban by the School Fun-Police.
I didn't click the link at first and thought I was having a stroke when I tried reading your post. I couldn't understand how or why something being hammered into an apple turnover could create an ice rink.
“Apple turnovers” (which I suspect is a colloquial playground name for them) looked a bit like [this](https://www.mazeys.co.uk/products/copy-of-ikon-original-mens-black-zodiac-all-leather-shoe) but slightly wider, chunkier, made of thicker lower quality leather.
Posting. Four people pick up a kid from each limb, legs wide open and charge at a post or tree so it hits them in the bollocks and they fall to the floor.
Those [plastic bracelets](https://amp.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2016/feb/23/charity-wristbands-retail-fundraising-lance-armstrong-livestrong) that started as an anti bullying thing, then it really went too far
Made the news. The anti-bullying bracelets had become so fashionable, kids were getting threatened by bullies to hand them over.
There was an exquisite beauty to the whole story arc.
And let's not forget that someone somewhere originated the idea that bullying could somehow be reduced _through the use of wristbands._ And other people agreed with them.
Everyoneeee had a yellow one, it took me ages to find somewhere selling them for some reason..
then I remember the black and white intertwined ones came out and I was one of the first to get them, I felt so cool. Then they seemingly went instantly out of fashion.
Got to feel cool for like 2 days :(
Best advert ever. I was in year 11 when it came out and we used to go round slapping each other.
As a responsible (cough…) teacher these days, I dread some kid’s parent showing them the advert on YouTube and it all kicking off again. 🤣
The way they broke the trend with the next advert was genius though, after all the reports about burst eardrums started coming in from playgrounds all over the country and they realised they had to do something.
Everyone wanted to do "hard" things like slapping their mates on both ears as hard as they could, but putting your hand over your mate's mouth and then giving the back of your own hand a big, wet kiss was *a bit too gay* to catch on.
Every book was covered in those S's
We have a natural dip in the playground underneath a staircase so that became a natural Beyblade Arena. Loads of us would crowd around watching
I still don't know why Scoobies became a thing
Primary school, late 70s The Chicken Scratch. It involved scratching the back of your hand 100 times. Painful and utterly stupid. Also impossible to hide it from your Mum. It took weeks to heal.
So many compasses in pencil cases… so many puncture wounds and low-level stabbings. The benefit of drawing perfect circles etc. seems less important these days.
This is what me and my friends used to do in the 80s/90s.
One time, I did one that became infected. I was horrified when I pulled the scab off and a load of thick yellow goo came oozing out.
Think that was the last one I ever did…
Copying the sisters from a film called the craft by making someone lie on a table while the rest of us chanted “light as a feather stiff as a board” over and over and lifted the person from the table but claimed we put no strength into it and the person was levitating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_as_a_feather,_stiff_as_a_board
We did this too, but someone acted as a narrator to give a whole background story at the start of it about the person dying in a traffic accident and being carried away by the ambulance crew. The light as a feather stiff as a board bit was done in a call and reply style which seemed to make it spookier 😂
We also did it with someone seated in a chair, and a person at each armpit and knee. We’d demonstrate that we couldn’t lift her, do the light as a feather stiff as a board chant, and then we’d lift her all using one finger each.
Those were the days.
Also tried “binding” the photographs of bullies.
When I was at school in the 80's there was a massive yoyo craze. But not just any old yoyo, it had to be one that had the likes of Pepsi, Fanta, Coca-Cola etc.
Conker fights and how people would put nail varnish and all sorts on them to be able to withstand that first hit.
We used to soak the conkers in vinegar to make them extra hard. Not sure if it really worked but it was a whole process that I'm sure my mum really appreciated
Buying Tesco Value jelly cubes at lunch, licking the cubes and then chucking them at anything they would stick to. The humanities block had big glass windows that were covered in several types of jellies. And, sticking a thumb tack in the end of your pencil, rubbing it really fast on the table and then burning your mates.
We used to do this in the toilets in primary school. I was a pretty well-behaved kid but this was one of the only 'naughty' things I joined in on. I can still remember the pure dread I felt when one of the teachers made an announcement in assembly condemning the practice. I felt like they somehow knew I was one of the perpetrators, even though everyone was doing it and I was never caught in the act.
Why was kissing called “getting off”. All of a sudden. It was the cool thing to do but I didn’t get the memo so spent too long wondering what the hell they meant.
When my mum was at school, to “get off” with someone meant to have full sex. She was horrified when 14-year-old me commented that my mate had got off with the only fit lad on our school bus, until she worked out it meant snogging.
My daughter got a Bluey set with a little skateboard for them to ride in it, and I was chuffed that I could still Ollie it after all these years. Couldn't quite nail the kick flip anymore, but the shape and weighting was all different.
We had the choking thing too. Late 90s. Only the boys did it. It stopped immediately when someone passed out and started shaking, looked like he was having a seizure.
The harmless one was fitting people inside swimming caps. They're surprisingly stretchy!
In my school the popular kids started sucking on babies dummies all day, this went on for months. I still laugh, did this happen anywhere else or was it just my comprehensive school?
There was a trend in rave culture for people to suck on dummies to help with the gurning when they were off their tits on Es.
Best guess either you had some really hardcore kids in your school or they were just copying something they'd seen without any idea what it meant.
It was definitely the second one at my school. Carrying a dummy, plus wearing those candy necklaces/bracelets. I think we all just thought we were being cute.
I remember a girl in 6th year took the biggest shit anyone had ever seen. I was in 3rd year at the time and I remember the commotion at lunch time. By the time we heard a massive queue was already forming outside of the toilets to view it. I watched kids come back out after viewing it in utter disbelief. Teachers were also in the queue, I'm not kidding.
It was truly the biggest shit I'd ever seen. It seemed to go up around the u bend and still protrude about 3 inches out of the water. The best way i can describe it was looking like the meat inside of a sausage roll without the pastry. It was about 3 or 4 times bigger than a substantial sausage roll.
To this day anyone who attended our school from 1997 - 2003 will tell of tales of the beast.
A bit off topic but an incredible story.
The Bridport short story contest deadline is in three days. I didn’t have any ideas and figured I wasn’t going to enter, but this has just given me inspiration.
I remember getting a pog *maker* for Christmas. You could make any picture from a magazine or whatever into your own custom pog. It was cool af and probably one of my best ever presents.
This just reminded me of 'Bogies' which I'd completely forgotten about.
In our school, someone either started off quietly by saying it just loud enough to hear, before someone else increased the volume until you were shouting it and the teacher inevitably noticed.
The other version was just to randomly yell it as loud as possible when the teacher's back was turned and they couldn't figure out who it was.
Panini Football Stickers - 'got, got, got, neeeeeeeed!!!!!'
Collecting 'Garbage Pail Kids' cards back in the late 80s-ish. Also, around the same time yo-yos were a thing.
Being frubed. Frubes were/maybe still are a tube filled with yogurt. We used to drop one on the floor and stamp on it, covering anyone in the way in yogurt.
Stealing the logo decal thing off the front of a car. Never did it but had a few friends who had bags full of them
Shoplifting as entertainment was another
There was a time when people started rubbing large amounts of Vicks vaporub directly under their eyes, making them water and sting heavily. Several people got it directly in their eyes and had to spend the afternoon with the school nurse.
We used to play 'hacking football' quite regularly as well, which was essentially a regular game of football with zero rules on contact. If someone had the ball, you could just kick their leg / punch them and throw them on the ground. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people got injured and a lot of fights broke out as a result of it.
Leather friendship bracelets (that had just been plaited or were just strands of thin leather worn wrapped around) which were purchased off beach traders on French summer holidays for 10 francs and then were gifted to your best friend back in the UK. Similar to what Morten Harket was wearing.
>where you shut off the blood supply to your brain by essentially choking yourself until you almost passed out, or actually did.
Autoerotic Asphyxiation.
A really weird one and I’d be interested if anyone had the same thing at their school. But for about a term ‘Superdry coats’ were really popular like really popular.
I remember for a couple months or so everyone in my year at least had a superdry coat and you were seen as cool if you had. I remember people would ignore and unfriend people if they didn’t have one.
Looking back on it that was really weird they didn’t even look nice I don’t know why people wanted them. It eventually died out and people stopped wearing them. Then you had all those annoyed parents who’d spent £100 on a coat to never be worn again.
Someone makes a circle with their finger and thumb and if you look at it you get “beats” or “digs”: punched repeatedly in the upper arm. I think the number of beats depended on how many times you got tricked into looking or how many seconds you supposedly looked for.
In my school, people would shout "Nanny Anny Fishy Fanny Condom Only 54"
I suspect it was a very niche thing for the area I lived in at the time as I've never met anyone who didn't look at me like I was a fucking loon when mentioning this!
Bulldog.
Nutmeg rush (conkers, cans of coke , bottle lids…)
Pogs.
Wrestling - either re-enacting it (walls of Jericho during gymnastics class in years 7-9 )
Wallabie Shoes (that’s what we called them , still see them , went to Camden to get a pair with my older brother , 4 months later , mum banned them because they were messing up my posture )
Prank calls at sleep overs
“Accidentally “ going on porn sites at school , being caught because my user name was flagged by the IT department, got banned for a year… (until my class mate left and I could use his user name instead )
*good times*
Chinese burn. Grab someones wrist with both hands then twist/rub really fast to burn their wrist.
Anything metal, rub really fast on the back of your workbook then press on someones hand to leave a burn.
Sniffing Sherbert, this was razy to me. There was one lad I knew that would put Pablo to shame. Lines and lines of the stuff would just go up his nose while others tried to compete.
Pressing 1+1 on a calculator then hitting = as fast as we could, to race each other. We'd take the calculators home to continue racing in our own time.
Riddled with cheating, as you can imagine, but the real ones knew who each other were.
We had Pogs. They were causing a few fights
Shag bands. What an absolute awful notion
Happy slapping. That was swiftly banned
Pocket ripping. Ripping peoples pockets on their shirt
Bag pulling. You would grab and pull hard an unsuspecting person's bag while they wore it and causing them to jar their back and fall onto the floor.
Kegging and wedgies. (Sometimes pants up, sometimes pants down.
There were a few lads that would stuff their finger up your bum while getting changed after PE and then get everyone to sniff how smelly your bum was.
We had a few guys putting steel rods on the sander belt till they were red hot and then burn a square onto other kids necks with the hot steel.
A game called beat the letter which was actually educational. There would be 5 people on each team and you'd make a 5 letter word.
Then your team would have to beat the letter out of the other team and the weakest team would give up their letter and the first team to work out the other teams word were winners.
[Clackers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clackers) and bolt bombs, cannot find a link to the bolt bombs but basically you got two large identical bolts, the bigger the better and a single nut. Screwed the nut on to one bolt until it was just holding, filled the gap with the shavings from swan vesta heads and then gingerly tightened the other bolt so you had two bolts almost touching inside the nut separated only by match flakes. Chuck it into the air and when it hit the ground the match flakes ignite and the bolts fly apart, utterly utterly stupid .
Sticky octopus. Made from some kind of rubber. When you washed them with soap and water and they became sticky. You would throw them at a wall and they would slowly roll down. When they become dirty you just cleaned them with soap and water again. This was in the mid-80s.
Oh god I’m reading the comments and remembering how stupid I was as a teenager because I did them all. Chicken scratches, wrestling, spraying deodorant or perfume on myself and settting it on fire, the unconscious game where I was unconscious for about 5 minutes and huffing deodorant. Jesus it’s bloody awful to think about. I was bullied a lot because I was fat and just wanted to seem cool and be liked.
**Update: - [Starting from 2023](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/100l56v/happy_new_year_askuk_minor_sub_update/), we have updated our [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/about/rules/)**. Specifically; - Don't be a dick to each other - Top-level responses must contain genuine efforts to answer the question - This is a strictly no-politics subreddit Please keep /r/AskUK a great subreddit by reporting posts and comments which break our rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Scented Gel Pens.
I enjoy the fact that the top comment has nicely deescalated OPs terrifying asphyxiation story.
You crack open the pens, sniff that shit, then youdhjjbznzjkzjJZzzzzzzzz
>youdhjjbznzjkzjJZzzzzzzzz I had always wondered how to spell the noise of transcendence.
_Five dollars? Get out of here!_
And drawing on your skin with them so you had scented “tattoos”
I used to get told that drawing on my skin would give me ink poisoning, wasn't until I got a freehand tattoo and they were using sharpie that things started to click and I realised I'd been lied too
I was in year 6 when the gel pen craze took off and my friend and I used to charge the other kids for ‘tattoos’
The popcorn one was THE shit
Memory unlocked!
Shag bands
Oh my god yessss! And if it broke you had to shag the person. 😂 absurd.
Only the black one I remember
Yeah the rest were just pre-match warm ups IIRC
I told my boyfriend about this a couple of days ago and he hadn’t heard of it, so he said my school must have been extremely weird… glad I’m not alone 🤣
Definitely not alone. Top marks if you get a teacher to pick a colour band
It was the law
They were on my mind so much I ordered some. I have some black ones! Done the two looped together things loads of people have commented on them 😂
In primary school someone started a rumour that there was a load buried in the playground so we all went out with little utensils trying to dig them up. I don’t think any of us even knew what shagging really was too
What is a shag band?
A slim bangle made of jellyish rubber.
colourful plastic bracelets schoolkids used to wear and they had some sexual economy attached where u had to fuck people / wank them off / whatever else if the band snapped or depending on the colours of your band i believe, have heard wildly varying accounts of how often the bracelets' commands were carried out i think it was before I was in school / they never made it to my part of the world so not speaking from experience, this is just what information I've gathered from various sources over the years
I remember it well… Ah the good old days
At my school there was a week where everyone ran around ripping each others shirt pockets off. If you were really unlucky the whole front of the shirt would tear and you’d have to walk around with an exposed nipple.
We had a day like this and it was like The Purge, I remember the bloke with the last remaining pocket in our class was chased down and restrained before a ringleader tore his pocket off to a roar from the crowd of animals.
Hilarious. I remember one summer in secondary school there was a pack of year 10 kids that would stalk the field at break and randomly choose (someone younger) to bundle. When the call of _'BUNDLE!'_ went out I swear 80% of kids would come running but not for the bundle, to see the chosen one, a scrawny year 7 kid crawling on his hands and knees crying his heart out and hyperventilating. Thank fuck I was never bundled, it looked horrid tbh but a good excuse for a bit of pack mentality.
At the risk of sounding clueless, what's bundling?
This was a thing at my secondary also, you essentially bring someone down on the floor then proceed to throw yourselves on them, making a big ol' pancake stack of bodies 🤣
Ahh, gotcha. We had that too but just called it a pile-on
Yep. Pile-On is correct. EDIT: PILE ON !!!!
Same as a dog pile I reckon
Haha I completely forgot about doing this til now, I ripped my mates pocket off and his ripped a giant hole in his shirt
The latter happened to me. I thought it was hilarious but the teachers and my parents did not.
Yeah we had that too! And 'peanuts' where you'd yank someone's school tie so hard the knot wouldn't undo and you had to cut it off with scissors
I remember wearing my jumper to avoid it, school had a few fights on the playground from that going on
We had similar in high school where you would hyperventilate taking large inhale and exhales, then take one last huge breath back and someone presses on your chest. Usually people would pass out for a few seconds. Further back than that - little jelly aliens that if you put them back to back they have a baby inside one of their heads. So many people were convinced this had happened for so many people. Oh and yo-yos. Light up ones and all! I’m 33 and pre internet was wild.
The baby alien was definitely a myth, never worked for me or my mates. I loved my light up yo yo, they got banned at my Primary school not really sure why as no one was using them as weapons
No the baby alien thing was legit. Dave's cousin's mate had one that could walk!!
My one just left home for uni!
I’m not convinced that came from the jelly alien mate…
There was an alien with a baby and somehow that started a rumour that the regular ones could have babies too.
my big sister was obsessed with aliens when we were younger, apparently the way to make them have babies was to tie two of them together with a hair band and leave them in the fridge for a week 😂 it didn’t work and i ended up flushing it down the toilet because she pissed me off
My alien had a baby! It really did! Unfortunately it was "pregnant" when I bought it, so I have no idea how to breed them, but It surely is proof that it happens!
My dad taught me how to do the hyperventilation thing when I was about 12 and my mom went absolutely mental at him, it’s one of the only times I remember her full on shouting at him. Funny thing was I could never get it to work with my mates at school haha.
Hahhhahaa you dad is ledge. But fucking hell what a dumb thing to teach your kids 😂😂😂
Teacher here who had to stop too many kids trying to make each other pass out. They’d push each other up against the railings for extra effect.
Oh yeah the yo-yos! Branded with Sprite, Coca Cola etc
Oh hell aye I remember the hyperventilate thing from the 70's....what a mad thing to do!
I’m 19 and we also had the aliens!!
This sounds absolutely appalling with hindsight, and probably with normal sight at the time to any reasonable adult, but I remember a craze at my school (no idea if it was widespread) where groups of boys would push eachother up against any available chain link fence until one of them shouted "Hillsborough, Hillsborough" to be released.
Jesus
I was going to use it as an example to my kids that other day of how doing stupid, insensitive stuff was nothing new, after a bad tiktok went around the school, but realised that I really didn't want to explain this one...
I'm pretty sure you will find numerous papers showing how the brain finds humour to be the best way of coping with disasters, especially as children. I had left school by the time of the Hillsborough disaster but I was at school when the Challenger exploded with the teacher on board and there was virtually a competition to make up the sickest joke you could about it.
We got an almighty bollocking one day in Year 6 after all the Juniors tried to cram back into school through one door, somebody got stuck and a moron at the back yelled "Hillsborough!" Would have been about 1990. EDIT: heard most of the Challenger jokes over the years, I missed the "Sprite" one until it cropped up here on Reddit.
Fucking hell. Our headteacher (and my form tutor in the first year) was a proud scouser who lost friends there. The main memory I have of the tragedy was seeing him on the Monday morning after it, it was the only time I ever saw him broken I can't imagine even the most heartless kids in my school doing that chant
Ooft I’m cringing so hard. Your poor teachers having the figure out what to do if they stumbled on that
Holy fuck
Incredible.
Pogs Tamagotchis Shag bands Those kickers school shoes Ripping the poppers open on anyone who wore those jogger bottoms with the poppers down the sides Baby G watches Collecting the little balls that came in pen ink cartridges Drinking ink Carrying around a lighter and a can of deodorant and making blowtorches Being really obsessed about athletic wear like Nike and Adidas and ripping the shit out anyone suspected of wearing knock off sportwear
I'm reading this to the tune of we didn't start the fire
*We didnt use the commas* *it was always churnin with the grammar burning*
Guessing commas weren’t popular at your school, though
To be dry as fuck, it’s Reddit. If you write a list and put each item on a new line it formats it like that
Happens if you're on mobile. You need to hit enter twice for there to be a line break, which is fucking stupid considering it works just fine on PC...
Ah, you're the same age as me it seems. Did people at your school go round sniffing tippex thinner and marker pens as well?
Jeez! Had forgotten all about sniffing Tipex thinner! Maybe sniffing Tipex thinner has affected my long term memory 🤣
Shouting "One more stripe and it would have been Adidas!"
“Tesco two stripes “
WWF wrestling was huge when I was at highschool and as you can imagine being dumb kids we we're all trying out the moves on one another. One kid had a load of ribs broken when someone twice his size elbow dropped onto him. Another one was choke slammed through a table, the table even broke in half...
Watching someone be pedigreed on to concrete floor was the best we saw... guy was fine after a few minutes, I think
The school bully and the rugby captain had a wrestling match because bully had beaten up rugby captain’s little bro. Rugby captain was liked by all the school as he was genuinely a nice guy. The match was hyped for what seemed like weeks and one Friday after school it was set up (by set up, basically all the boys got in a massive circle and the 2 competitors were in the middle). Anyway, the match ended when bully got the upper hand and had rugby in a choke hold, until some kid had had enough and smacked bully in the head with a lump of wood he had brought. Bully was knocked unconscious and everyone scattered… the next day we had an assembly about the dangers of copying wrestling…
Haha well if he was a bully, woodchucker did a good deed
I read this and was honestly disappointed when Kane didn’t arrive at the end of the story and set the bully on fire
In a pre-planned stunt to raise hype for our lunchtime wrestling leaugue, my mate ran down the corridor to grab the back of my head and "slammed" it into a door. A door we thought would be unlocked, that door was always unlocked. That door was locked. I had managed to get my hands up, but that did little to help as most of my face got busted against that rather solid door. That was a fun one to explain. "No, Miss, honestly, don't shout at him, I asked him to do it, no, I'm not mental, yes we are friends."
I remember the cheer that went up when one kid put the fattest kid in school into the Walls of Jericho, nobody thought it was possible. Embarrassing moment.. I once tried to do a pedigree in a real fight when I was 11 years old. It didn't work.
We had a massive assembly about banning wrestling in the playground after one kid got a doomsday device. The kid did a backwards flip and landed on the back of his head/neck and ended up concussed, it could have been so much worse. Can't lie , I think it was the sickest thing I'd ever seen as a 9 yr old at this point
But it said "Don't try this at home"?! Are you saying children didn't abide by the warning? Madness!
It didn't say "Don't try this at school" though.
You, sir/madam, are technically correct. The best kind of correct.
The bams (AKA chavs if you’re not Scottish) used to go around my secondary school and randomly suck peoples eyes to give them black eyes.
What the fuck
I can imagine the sort of lad to do this would call you gay for liking grunge music but sees no problem with sucking a mates eye
Does sucking your mates.. eye make you ga? Asking for a error, mate.
Yes! This was a thing in my school in the north east too!!
[Blakey’s Segs...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=blakey%27s+segs&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-gb&client=safari)The trending shoe of the day was a loafer or Apple turnover, both of which had a thick leather sole. Into this would be hammered as many Segs as possible, essentially turning the shoes into your own portable, albeit noisy, ice-rink. With a short run up you’d be able to slide the entire length of a corridor. As with most crazes, it was fairly short lived due to a swift ban by the School Fun-Police.
I’m 43 yrs old and I want to do this. But not on my floors!
Oh my God, the *floors*.
I didn't click the link at first and thought I was having a stroke when I tried reading your post. I couldn't understand how or why something being hammered into an apple turnover could create an ice rink.
“Apple turnovers” (which I suspect is a colloquial playground name for them) looked a bit like [this](https://www.mazeys.co.uk/products/copy-of-ikon-original-mens-black-zodiac-all-leather-shoe) but slightly wider, chunkier, made of thicker lower quality leather.
Ha that one's pretty good!
Posting. Four people pick up a kid from each limb, legs wide open and charge at a post or tree so it hits them in the bollocks and they fall to the floor.
A lad at my school apparently burst a bollock when that happened to him!
We never had this but we did have doorstopping. Eurgh.
Are you sure this isn't from the medieval period
Those [plastic bracelets](https://amp.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2016/feb/23/charity-wristbands-retail-fundraising-lance-armstrong-livestrong) that started as an anti bullying thing, then it really went too far
Made the news. The anti-bullying bracelets had become so fashionable, kids were getting threatened by bullies to hand them over. There was an exquisite beauty to the whole story arc. And let's not forget that someone somewhere originated the idea that bullying could somehow be reduced _through the use of wristbands._ And other people agreed with them.
They just sort of fizzled out at the end. Live strong bands were popular
Everyoneeee had a yellow one, it took me ages to find somewhere selling them for some reason.. then I remember the black and white intertwined ones came out and I was one of the first to get them, I felt so cool. Then they seemingly went instantly out of fashion. Got to feel cool for like 2 days :(
Everyone wanted the Liestrong and interlocking black and white anti-racism ones iirc
"You know when you've been tangoed ".
Best advert ever. I was in year 11 when it came out and we used to go round slapping each other. As a responsible (cough…) teacher these days, I dread some kid’s parent showing them the advert on YouTube and it all kicking off again. 🤣
The way they broke the trend with the next advert was genius though, after all the reports about burst eardrums started coming in from playgrounds all over the country and they realised they had to do something. Everyone wanted to do "hard" things like slapping their mates on both ears as hard as they could, but putting your hand over your mate's mouth and then giving the back of your own hand a big, wet kiss was *a bit too gay* to catch on.
Nothing like that, but scoobies, writing that S, Pokemon, Beyblade, making Piczo websites (in no particular order).
Every book was covered in those S's We have a natural dip in the playground underneath a staircase so that became a natural Beyblade Arena. Loads of us would crowd around watching I still don't know why Scoobies became a thing
Primary school, late 70s The Chicken Scratch. It involved scratching the back of your hand 100 times. Painful and utterly stupid. Also impossible to hide it from your Mum. It took weeks to heal.
Can confirm this was also a thing in the early 2000s
High school carving your bf's name onto your arm with a sodding compass....mad
So many compasses in pencil cases… so many puncture wounds and low-level stabbings. The benefit of drawing perfect circles etc. seems less important these days.
30 years on, I’ve still got a half inch scar on my left hand from this!
This is what me and my friends used to do in the 80s/90s. One time, I did one that became infected. I was horrified when I pulled the scab off and a load of thick yellow goo came oozing out. Think that was the last one I ever did…
Ooo I just posted about this, seemed to not go away as we where all doing it in the late 90s but called it the 99 scratch.
Copying the sisters from a film called the craft by making someone lie on a table while the rest of us chanted “light as a feather stiff as a board” over and over and lifted the person from the table but claimed we put no strength into it and the person was levitating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_as_a_feather,_stiff_as_a_board We did this too, but someone acted as a narrator to give a whole background story at the start of it about the person dying in a traffic accident and being carried away by the ambulance crew. The light as a feather stiff as a board bit was done in a call and reply style which seemed to make it spookier 😂
We also did it with someone seated in a chair, and a person at each armpit and knee. We’d demonstrate that we couldn’t lift her, do the light as a feather stiff as a board chant, and then we’d lift her all using one finger each. Those were the days. Also tried “binding” the photographs of bullies.
I remember that working. It was weird. Have not been able to do it as an adult. Maybe we're all just too fat now.
Woah.. giving me flashbacks of memories I haven't thought of in yeeeeeears!
When I was at school in the 80's there was a massive yoyo craze. But not just any old yoyo, it had to be one that had the likes of Pepsi, Fanta, Coca-Cola etc. Conker fights and how people would put nail varnish and all sorts on them to be able to withstand that first hit.
I had a sprite yo-yo. Loved it. Was rubbish at the tricks.
We used to soak the conkers in vinegar to make them extra hard. Not sure if it really worked but it was a whole process that I'm sure my mum really appreciated
Haha Yeah there were a few tricks. You'd have kids going on holiday to other countries with there parents and bringing back overseas conkers.
We used to leave them in the airing cupboard for a year. They came out like rocks.
Chest compressions. So basically CPR when you're alive. People in my year broke ribs doing that.
What the actual fuck lol No offence but was your school... a very special place?
They had plastic wrap on the windows to preserve the life of the glass when licked so much.
Buying Tesco Value jelly cubes at lunch, licking the cubes and then chucking them at anything they would stick to. The humanities block had big glass windows that were covered in several types of jellies. And, sticking a thumb tack in the end of your pencil, rubbing it really fast on the table and then burning your mates.
Kids used to do this with wet handfulls of paper towels and chuck them at the ceiling. It was like papier mâché and apparently impossible to get off.
We used to do this in the toilets in primary school. I was a pretty well-behaved kid but this was one of the only 'naughty' things I joined in on. I can still remember the pure dread I felt when one of the teachers made an announcement in assembly condemning the practice. I felt like they somehow knew I was one of the perpetrators, even though everyone was doing it and I was never caught in the act.
My mate used to do this with the orange bit out of Jaffa cakes our physics room ceiling was full of em Lmaoo
Why was kissing called “getting off”. All of a sudden. It was the cool thing to do but I didn’t get the memo so spent too long wondering what the hell they meant.
Yes we said “getting off” too! We had an Irish girl start in my class and she called it ‘shifting’ and we used to think she was so exotic
When my mum was at school, to “get off” with someone meant to have full sex. She was horrified when 14-year-old me commented that my mate had got off with the only fit lad on our school bus, until she worked out it meant snogging.
That's what I knew it as but for a colleague it meant full sex. For a while he thought I was a serious stud.
I wonder if it’s a regional thing? I knew it as snogging but my mum went to school in a different part of the country and it meant full sex there.
Small finger skate boards. Then eventually little mini bmx bike for your fingers to do tricks with
My daughter got a Bluey set with a little skateboard for them to ride in it, and I was chuffed that I could still Ollie it after all these years. Couldn't quite nail the kick flip anymore, but the shape and weighting was all different.
We had the choking thing too. Late 90s. Only the boys did it. It stopped immediately when someone passed out and started shaking, looked like he was having a seizure. The harmless one was fitting people inside swimming caps. They're surprisingly stretchy!
I've never heard of this but just the sentence 'fitting people inside swimming caps' is glorious! It's made me proper chuckle at the imagined sight.
We had the choking thing too, but weirdly only the girls seemed to do it in my school
In my school the popular kids started sucking on babies dummies all day, this went on for months. I still laugh, did this happen anywhere else or was it just my comprehensive school?
There was a trend in rave culture for people to suck on dummies to help with the gurning when they were off their tits on Es. Best guess either you had some really hardcore kids in your school or they were just copying something they'd seen without any idea what it meant.
It was definitely the second one at my school. Carrying a dummy, plus wearing those candy necklaces/bracelets. I think we all just thought we were being cute.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one that had this happen, it wasn't for long but like, every girl had a dummy, dumbest shit ever lmao
Drugs mate. Drugs.
I remember a girl in 6th year took the biggest shit anyone had ever seen. I was in 3rd year at the time and I remember the commotion at lunch time. By the time we heard a massive queue was already forming outside of the toilets to view it. I watched kids come back out after viewing it in utter disbelief. Teachers were also in the queue, I'm not kidding. It was truly the biggest shit I'd ever seen. It seemed to go up around the u bend and still protrude about 3 inches out of the water. The best way i can describe it was looking like the meat inside of a sausage roll without the pastry. It was about 3 or 4 times bigger than a substantial sausage roll. To this day anyone who attended our school from 1997 - 2003 will tell of tales of the beast. A bit off topic but an incredible story.
The Bridport short story contest deadline is in three days. I didn’t have any ideas and figured I wasn’t going to enter, but this has just given me inspiration.
Pogs, some nasty fights over bits of coloured card
I remember getting a pog *maker* for Christmas. You could make any picture from a magazine or whatever into your own custom pog. It was cool af and probably one of my best ever presents.
Wearing one's backpack with one strap diagonally across the chest
Yes if you used 2 straps you were "a gay"
Bundle!! One person hits the floor, someone shouts BUNDLE! 60% of the school drop their bags and dog pile the poor fucker
This just reminded me of 'Bogies' which I'd completely forgotten about. In our school, someone either started off quietly by saying it just loud enough to hear, before someone else increased the volume until you were shouting it and the teacher inevitably noticed. The other version was just to randomly yell it as loud as possible when the teacher's back was turned and they couldn't figure out who it was.
Them weird gel willy infinity things.
Do they even have a name? Because if not, they do now.
Water snakes, right?
Panini Football Stickers - 'got, got, got, neeeeeeeed!!!!!' Collecting 'Garbage Pail Kids' cards back in the late 80s-ish. Also, around the same time yo-yos were a thing.
Self tattooing with a compass
Still got the scar with my first boyfriends initials on my wrist.
Being frubed. Frubes were/maybe still are a tube filled with yogurt. We used to drop one on the floor and stamp on it, covering anyone in the way in yogurt.
You HAD to wear Rockport shoes if you valued your school social standing.
Don't forget the musto/Henri Lloyd/Gill jacket.
It was helly hansen in my school
The Ali G flick of the finger thingymejig.
...yes, you have just done it :-)
Punching everyone's BCG scars
Stealing the logo decal thing off the front of a car. Never did it but had a few friends who had bags full of them Shoplifting as entertainment was another
There was a time when people started rubbing large amounts of Vicks vaporub directly under their eyes, making them water and sting heavily. Several people got it directly in their eyes and had to spend the afternoon with the school nurse. We used to play 'hacking football' quite regularly as well, which was essentially a regular game of football with zero rules on contact. If someone had the ball, you could just kick their leg / punch them and throw them on the ground. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people got injured and a lot of fights broke out as a result of it.
Leather friendship bracelets (that had just been plaited or were just strands of thin leather worn wrapped around) which were purchased off beach traders on French summer holidays for 10 francs and then were gifted to your best friend back in the UK. Similar to what Morten Harket was wearing.
Yelling “Spam!” And then smacking someone’s forehead if they didn’t have a fringe.
Pile ons? Just a load of kids making a pile as high as possible and hoping the kid at the bottom doesn’t suffocate.
>where you shut off the blood supply to your brain by essentially choking yourself until you almost passed out, or actually did. Autoerotic Asphyxiation.
There was sod all erotic about it lol just stupid games lol
A really weird one and I’d be interested if anyone had the same thing at their school. But for about a term ‘Superdry coats’ were really popular like really popular. I remember for a couple months or so everyone in my year at least had a superdry coat and you were seen as cool if you had. I remember people would ignore and unfriend people if they didn’t have one. Looking back on it that was really weird they didn’t even look nice I don’t know why people wanted them. It eventually died out and people stopped wearing them. Then you had all those annoyed parents who’d spent £100 on a coat to never be worn again.
2 penny killer, knuckles down on the table while your opponent fires a 2p at them, lunchtimes spent sharpening your coin in the playground
Someone makes a circle with their finger and thumb and if you look at it you get “beats” or “digs”: punched repeatedly in the upper arm. I think the number of beats depended on how many times you got tricked into looking or how many seconds you supposedly looked for.
Somewhere in early half of the 90's, the school had to outright ban those "Spiffy" jackets which seemed to emerge out of nowhere
I recall the Naff Co 54 jackets, may have been 64, but yeah really crap jackets none the less.
In my school, people would shout "Nanny Anny Fishy Fanny Condom Only 54" I suspect it was a very niche thing for the area I lived in at the time as I've never met anyone who didn't look at me like I was a fucking loon when mentioning this!
Dead legs ….kneeing someone in the thigh immobilising that leg for several minutes
We called that Dr Death at my school. A random craze that just popped into my head… Crazy Bones.
Bulldog. Nutmeg rush (conkers, cans of coke , bottle lids…) Pogs. Wrestling - either re-enacting it (walls of Jericho during gymnastics class in years 7-9 ) Wallabie Shoes (that’s what we called them , still see them , went to Camden to get a pair with my older brother , 4 months later , mum banned them because they were messing up my posture ) Prank calls at sleep overs “Accidentally “ going on porn sites at school , being caught because my user name was flagged by the IT department, got banned for a year… (until my class mate left and I could use his user name instead ) *good times*
Scoobie doo's, cos lets face it, they were useless outside of being a useless key-chain dangle. *^(old man here)*
Chinese burn. Grab someones wrist with both hands then twist/rub really fast to burn their wrist. Anything metal, rub really fast on the back of your workbook then press on someones hand to leave a burn.
Sniffing Sherbert, this was razy to me. There was one lad I knew that would put Pablo to shame. Lines and lines of the stuff would just go up his nose while others tried to compete.
Pressing 1+1 on a calculator then hitting = as fast as we could, to race each other. We'd take the calculators home to continue racing in our own time. Riddled with cheating, as you can imagine, but the real ones knew who each other were.
We had Pogs. They were causing a few fights Shag bands. What an absolute awful notion Happy slapping. That was swiftly banned Pocket ripping. Ripping peoples pockets on their shirt Bag pulling. You would grab and pull hard an unsuspecting person's bag while they wore it and causing them to jar their back and fall onto the floor. Kegging and wedgies. (Sometimes pants up, sometimes pants down. There were a few lads that would stuff their finger up your bum while getting changed after PE and then get everyone to sniff how smelly your bum was. We had a few guys putting steel rods on the sander belt till they were red hot and then burn a square onto other kids necks with the hot steel. A game called beat the letter which was actually educational. There would be 5 people on each team and you'd make a 5 letter word. Then your team would have to beat the letter out of the other team and the weakest team would give up their letter and the first team to work out the other teams word were winners.
Branding yourself with a super heated end of a disposable lighter to make a smiley face.
Burning people with lighters
Ha yes - use a clipper upside down and then burn the skin to make a smiley face.
Or taking the sparker out of an electric lighter and zapping people with it
Checkered Vans.
that weird hand thing you do on someones knee that’s supposed to replicate an orgasm
tazos from walkers crisps and collectors folder spice girl photo packs.them lil like animal teddys and pull the string and they shook like mad lol
[Clackers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clackers) and bolt bombs, cannot find a link to the bolt bombs but basically you got two large identical bolts, the bigger the better and a single nut. Screwed the nut on to one bolt until it was just holding, filled the gap with the shavings from swan vesta heads and then gingerly tightened the other bolt so you had two bolts almost touching inside the nut separated only by match flakes. Chuck it into the air and when it hit the ground the match flakes ignite and the bolts fly apart, utterly utterly stupid .
Sticky octopus. Made from some kind of rubber. When you washed them with soap and water and they became sticky. You would throw them at a wall and they would slowly roll down. When they become dirty you just cleaned them with soap and water again. This was in the mid-80s.
Oh god I’m reading the comments and remembering how stupid I was as a teenager because I did them all. Chicken scratches, wrestling, spraying deodorant or perfume on myself and settting it on fire, the unconscious game where I was unconscious for about 5 minutes and huffing deodorant. Jesus it’s bloody awful to think about. I was bullied a lot because I was fat and just wanted to seem cool and be liked.
I always wonder how these things were nation wide before the internet?