Whether you went to the local comprehensive or Eton College, along with acne and awkwardness, there are certain things that every Brit can remember from their schooldays
1) Trying to impress your mates with your yo-yo skills like the ‘sleeper’ and ‘walk the dog’, then getting cocky and inevitably whacking someone in the head as you attempted the ‘around the world’
2) Wondering whether it was actually possible to collect the full England World Cup Squad Coin Collection because you only ever seemed to find David Seamen or Alan Shearer
3) School Discos, which consisted of 2 hours of the girls in one corner performing complicated choreographed routines and the boys alternating between moshing and knee-slides
4) School Discos when you were a little bit older and the dilemma faced during slow dances - girls ‘do I put my head on his shoulder!?’ and boys ‘do I try and put my hands on her bum!?’
5) Pay-as-you-go Nokia mobile phones (specifically 3310’s and 5110’s) which only let you save 5 text messages at a time, the awesomeness that was the original snake game and the effort put into composing your own ringtones
6) Absolutely savage games of British Bulldog and Red Rover, both of which had no discernible rules whatsoever and always ended up with the headmaster announcing in morning assembly that it was now banned due to two broken arms and one dislocated shoulder
7) School Trips with all the ‘cool kids’ sitting in the back of the bus and the boys blasting Limp Bizkit through their speakers. ‘Alright partner, Keep on rollin' baby. You know what time it is...’
8) House Parties consisting of awkward games of spin the bottle, lurid-coloured alcopops, people getting off in the bushes and that one kid vomiting on themselves because they’d necked half a bottle of vodka in the park earlier
9) Not knowing whether your Kodak Disposable Camera was finished or had another photo left, suffering a mini heart attack when it flashed and ending up with a blurry photo of the floor and half your finger
10) MSN messenger all evening every evening. Signing in and out to get your crushes attention, appearing offline so the annoying kid that always spoke to you couldn’t talk to you and asking people to go on webcam whilst claiming yours was ‘broken’ (when actually you were in PJs and covered in spot cream)
11) Purchasing the ENTIRE Clearasil Range and proceeding to apply it in such high quantities that your skin literally ended up peeling off your face and the smell (the smell!) haunted your dreams.
12) That wanker with the guitar who’d always bring it out at lunch break, or worse, at house parties, shut their eyes and start playing Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls
13.) That moment when your class was SO badly behaved that the teacher completely lost their shit and either a) went silent and just stared b) stormed out c) cried or, the big one, d) swore
14.) Finding a pub that let you and your mates in even though you were clearly underage then everyone finding out about said pub and eventually everyone being banned because 87 of your year all tried to get in at once
15.) Using other people’s ID’s where the photo looked LITERALLY NOTHING LIKE YOU and the rush of adrenaline when you actually somehow managed to get past a bouncer and into a bar using it
16.) That one summer where everyone’s hair ended up a vibrant and bizarre shade of orange due to the misguided belief that Sun-In actually worked
17.) Three-way-calling with your best friend and your crush and having to pretend like your heart wasn’t smashed into a thousand pieces and that you 'didn’t care' when he said he fancied Melissa Jones and not you
18.) Frantically adding in your crushes middle name after you originally received the shockingly awful score of 9% in the ‘Love Calculator’ game but you knew you were destined to be with them
19.) Bragging about who’d done the least revision for GCSES/A levels when really you’d all done absolutely loads, apart from that one kid who really hadn’t done any but managed to get straight A’s (bastard)
20.) Thinking that people in their twenties were proper grown-ups (ha!).