Read Online My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle - Free Book Online Page A

repetition nobody was ever able to piece together exactly what it was he was saying.
    Remember that old joke about the Pope needing a heart transplant? He drops a feather from his balcony and whoever it lands on has to give the Pope his heart. When he looks down he sees thousands of people all blowing desperately. Well, Clarkson had a version of that. If the class grew restless while he rubbed out and redrew his battery diagram he would decide that somebody was getting a ‘punishment exercise’. He’d push a piece of paper down one of those big, long science tables and whoever it stopped at would take the punishment. Of course we all blew like fuck. I remember seeing a mum up at the school complaining about the number of undeserved punishments her son kept getting, not realising it was because he was an asthmatic.
    PE was generally dreaded. The teachers seemed to occupy something of an educational hinterland. Nominally a teacher but actually just a guy who likes running and throwing stuff. They were obsessed with getting us to climb ropes and wall-bars, like they were preparing us for a career in the eighteenth-century merchant navy. Our main teacher was a fitness nut called Mr McKean. At our first lesson he gave us a long speech about how flexibility peaked at twelve and explained that we were all stiffening towards death. Then we played dodgeball.
    We had an annual football event where everybody played a class that was a year older. It was notorious for its brutality and warming up there was the testosterone level of a botched prison break. I waited for the opening whistle and ran straight at the smallest guy on the other team and hoofed him right in the balls I had to do laps for an hour but the scene I was running round looked like a kung fu tribute to Saving Private Ryan .
    In second year there was a big formal run that everybody dreaded. Five miles round a big cinder-ash marsh. I came 123rd out of 132 boys. The fattest boy in the school was a guy called Chris Katos, whose dad ran a kebab shop. On the second lap I spotted him hiding under a bush at the side of the track, eating an enormous bag of pakora. It was like something from The Dandy .
    Our drama class was taken by Miss Skillen—a little middleaged woman with huge tits forming an obscene shelf at right angles to her body. Occasionally producers would come into the school and host auditions for parts in TV dramas. They can’t all have been like this, but the ones I went to always had English producers looking for people to play stereotypical heavy Glaswegians. I remember they were casting somebody to play a drug dealer and there was an audition piece where boys had to shake down a smaller boy for money. Everybody loved this guy called Craig Taylor, who delivered a performance of some gusto. The role wasn’t a huge stretch for him because he was an actual drug dealer. He came into that room after bullying money out of someone, pretended to bully money out of someone, thenwent outside to put the hurt on the real world again. He got something like five grand for the film and disappeared from school into a two-year-long party.
    Even among the kids who did the auditions, there was an amused awareness of being stereotyped. If Sir Ian McKellen had been born in Glasgow right now he’d be playing a gluesniffing bouncer with bi-polar disorder. We’re our own worst enemy. Even programmes made in Scotland portray most Scots as loveable chancers on heroin and incapacity benefit. Imagine if every TV show from America was about a cowboy eating hot dogs on the electric chair. Just once I’d love to see a sitcom based on Dundonian transgender ballet dancers living on a barge.
    I couldn’t act at all but I got a couple of parts as an extra with a line or two. I was a cheeky young gardener in a Play for Today . There was a bit where a bunch of us were supposed to shout abuse at Russell Hunter, who was the star, as we walked by in the distance. I couldn’t think of anything