For those amongst us who remember:- "When I was a boy"!

[daveg]

How about the music? My all time favourite is "Stranger on the Shore" by Akka Bilk - Lousy soap but great tune. One of my favourite artists still is Tom Lehrer

Ah, the magic of Tom Lehrer. I have his splendid album.

'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park' and 'The Irish Ballad' are especially good.

Also Paddy Roberts, just a bit earlier perhaps, with a more gentle approach to human frailties with his  'Ballad of Bethnal Green'.

R.I.P. Acker, who left us very recently. Remember him introducing his Paramount band as the Paralytic Jazz Band!

Dave G

[Newportnobby]

I played footie and cricket for the school but hated rugger. There was an element of sadism in that, even in the depths of winter with snow on the playing fields, one team wore strip and the others were known as 'skins' i.e. they were shirtless
We had an open air swimming pool and, after complaints from parents, they finally built a housing for it but still the pool was unheated

[Dorsetmike]

I was another of the sports and gym haters, the original 8 stone weakling.

As for final exams, in my day it was the school certificate, usually set and administered by, Oxford or Cambridge.

[Agrippa]

I well remember school PT teachers, the most useless set of  (choose your own expletives)
you could come across, they couldn't motivate a dog to put its leg against a tree.

I had one called Wee  Daddy Hart who looked like a small version of Kojak, he would
make you do dangerous movements on wall bars and vaulting horses, always saying
"I'd show you myself if it wasn't for this arm" , which he'd broken about 40 years before.

[petercharlesfagg]

One of the things I hated as a kid at school in England in the sixties was "games". We had to play rugby and football in winter (from September to April for those overseas) and cricket in summer. The "teachers" used to let the two best kids pick teams, which involved them choosing the best players one by one until only the duffers were left. I was one of the duffers, and I have to say that this was the most humiliating experience in my life. Since then I have always hated sport. I wonder if this system of picking teams was something that was taught in teacher training college, or whether one individual sadist invented it ?

Best regards,


Joe

Just like myself!

If possible I would skive off games just to miss the humiliation of not being picked for anything!

I was lucky in the latter years of schooling to attend a private school and there were always too many for the games, instead I enjoyed putting down the White lines and sitting in the warm whilst the others ran around the field!  I did have to do cross country but I never got further than the school boundary, I sat in a warm hay barn until the others started coming back!

Its a little like corporal punishment,  my school life was one punishment after another and the cane turned me into a real anti-social, people and establishment hater , ready to kill a cop at first sight!!                If you believe that you'll believe anything!!!

Peter.

[petercharlesfagg]

I played footie and cricket for the school but hated rugger. There was an element of sadism in that, even in the depths of winter with snow on the playing fields, one team wore strip and the others were known as 'skins' i.e. they were shirtless
We had an open air swimming pool and, after complaints from parents, they finally built a housing for it but still the pool was unheated

Just the same as my last school, a private school, "Cannock House".  The open air swimming pool was the real open flail your skin off affair!  I bunked off more lessons in the pool than I can remember!

Peter.

[Ditape]

I to used to hate school sports/games periods,I was always the short fat kid no one wanted on their team (not surprising as I was useless at field sports) I used to do anything to get out of doing it then I discovered cross country it turned out to be a unsupervised walk in the New Forest OK the real runners used to take about 45 mins where as I and few others took about 1 & 1/2 hours but the games teachers did not seem to mind .

[Malc]

Its a little like corporal punishment,  my school life was one punishment after another and the cane turned me into a real anti-social, people and establishment hater , ready to kill a cop at first sight!!                If you believe that you'll believe anything!!!

Peter.

I held the school record for the number of strokes of the cane. It was usually bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, being late or just messing about in class. We had a maths teacher who could throw the wooden backed board rubber with unerring accuracy, until he knocked poor Elliot out cold.

[port perran]

I think I'm in the minority here.
I loved sports - especially football and athletics (where I represented Wiltshire Schools in the 10,000 metres at the Southern England Championships).
We too played skins against shirts at football sometimes (regardless of the weather).
I well remember our sports teacher who loved you if you were good and ignored you if you were useless.
We had a 1st X1 game one winter and one lad (our star centre forward no less)asked if he might wear gloves. The sports master (Joe Colin - Bless him) looked incredulous (even though it was about -10).
His reply was "Of Course Sonny - No worries". We all though Joe had gone soft!
Next week, however,  when the team sheet went up on the board our star striker was unbelievably named in goal ! When questioned about  this, Joe Colin simply replied "I thought you wanted to wear gloves sonny - here's your chance".

[railsquid]

Funny thing was, my family was/is keen orienteers, and many a Sunday was spent flailing about some sodden bramble-infested wood or sheep'n'bracken-filled moor, and I did actually win a silver medal in a national championship once by some freaky chance. But anything involving balls and teams, no thanks. I think I kept the medal thing quiet because the school would have tried to garner some sporting credos from it, even thought it was nothing to do with them.

Anyway the school in question has long since been demolished to make way for houses, so I guess I win 

[daveg]

Ah ' Double PE'! Horrors!

I was and still am hopeless at kicking a ball or catching one for that matter.

I did do a bit of running but wasn't any good at it really. Cross country was a genuine nightmare despite our teacher declaring he had two speeds: 'Dead Slow and Stop'.

Me and my asthmatic form chum used to walk most of the way.

Dave G

[colpatben]

Judging by the above most of us disliked 'Outdoor Sports', that's probably why we now model N gauge indoors.

Can't find an appropriate 'smiley' we need more, maybe couch potatoes! et al.

??

[Newportnobby]

I played footie and cricket for the school but hated rugger. There was an element of sadism in that, even in the depths of winter with snow on the playing fields, one team wore strip and the others were known as 'skins' i.e. they were shirtless
We had an open air swimming pool and, after complaints from parents, they finally built a housing for it but still the pool was unheated

Just the same as my last school, a private school, "Cannock House".  The open air swimming pool was the real open flail your skin off affair!  I bunked off more lessons in the pool than I can remember!

Peter.

Trouble is as soon as you'd dried yourself/got dressed/warmed up some wag would nick your trunks and throw them back in the pool

[Ditape]

As couch potatoes have been mentioned I would like to mention couch potatoes are healthier than sports men/women I have proof of this, when I was a senior CPO in Nuclear Repair at Faslane we did a survey over 12 months and the sporty types had more than 10 times the time off on the sick than us couch potatoes.

[longbridge]

Peter mentioned the Cross Country runs at school, myself and a few mates used to love that race, it used to give us a chance to saunter around the circuit totally undetected and have a fag or two, one of us used to limp back to school helped by the others, we used to call it the twisted ankle trick and it worked every time.