#oneaday Day 527: Doing a Bum-Sex

As you may have surmised from some of the earlier entries in this blog, my experiences working as a classroom teacher were genuinely traumatic at the time, on many occasions causing me considerable amounts of stress, depression, panic attacks, you name it.

In retrospect, now I don’t have to deal with the little scrotes on a daily basis, some of the things were quite amusing. These things weren’t amusing at the time (and when you think about it, are often quite tragic) but now I take a perverse satisfaction in the fact that these little horrors who once made my life such a misery will surely find themselves in difficult positions in the future, unless they discover a way to stop being such a twat.

Let’s take the cast of Fat Barry, so named because his name was Barry and he was fat. This may sound a bit harsh, but this is a child who, among other things, decided that rather than engaging with Music lessons, he would place a cymbal on his head and wander around pretending to be a racial stereotype of a Chinese peasant in a school with a not-inconsiderable population of ethnic minorities, so in my mind he deserves all the abuse in the world.

I didn’t just take Fat Barry for Music lessons. I also had the pleasure of his company in a subject known mysteriously as “Key Skills”, a lesson which I didn’t learn until after I’d started at the school was basically “the spaz class”, where all the children too stupid (or, more often, badly behaved) to achieve anything whatsoever got the opportunity to sit around and learn how to use washing machines and read.

On one memorable occasion, the Year 8 Key Skills class was tasked with researching famous people, living or dead, that they might like to invite to a dinner party. (I hasten to add I had nothing to do with the planning of these units, so their vapid nature wasn’t my choice — although it’s not as if we could have got anything more intellectually stimulating out of most of them.) As befits a research task, we had relocated out of our stuffy classroom (which on one memorable occasion, I was locked in while the children found it hilarious to climb out of the window, but that’s another story) into the school library.

For once, most of the kids were sitting down actually looking at books — being given the opportunity to look up things they were actually interested in rather than being forced into set topics in English, Maths, Science and all the rest meant that they were, thank the stars, engaged and quiet.

All except for two, who were conspicuously absent. Fat Barry and his friend Shane, whose defining characteristic was the fact that he habitually wore trousers slightly too short for him coupled with prominent Burberry-pattern socks. (I’m not sure Burberry actually make socks.) I could hear giggling from behind some of the shelves, so while the rest of the class were engrossed in their picture books I went to investigate.

I wasn’t quite prepared for what I found. Shane was lying face-down on the floor, with Fat Barry straddling him. (Fortunately, both were fully clothed, although I’m surprised Shane could breathe.) Fat Barry was gyrating somewhat suggestively atop his friend, and I foolishly said the first thing that popped into my head.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“We’re doing a bum-sex, sir!” replied Fat Barry.

In retrospect, what I should have done at that point is open the library door and yell down the echoey school corridors “What’s that, Barry? You’re doing a bum-sex? That’s a bit gay, isn’t it?” because, as everyone knows, accusations of being gay are like the worst things ever at secondary school, leading to the whole problem where genuinely gay teenagers feel that they can’t come out for fear of being ridiculed. I was aware of this problem, which is perhaps why I chose not to do it.

Fat Barry wasn’t gay, incidentally. He had a Grandad with a shotgun that he thoughtfully brought along to one of the rehearsals of the school play — a mildly terrifying moment — and would probably have been on the receiving end of some redneck punishment if he had come out as gay. So his proclamation of the fact he was supposedly delivering anal pleasure to his best friend on the floor of the library occurred for one reason only — to shock and appal.

It worked.