There comes a time in the life of a schoolboy where he must face up to the questioning of his mother when he returns from school with yet another rip in his school trousers. Depending on the child and the severity of the rip, his answers to the questioning would vary. If he was a timid child, he would cry and say someone pushed him. If he were a rebellious child, ripping his trousers would probably rank fairly low on his list of concerns, and if like me, he was an overweight and cumbersome child, he would accept that whilst at school his sole purpose in life was to rip his trousers.
I was forever skinning my knees after falling over in the yard, usually in a failed effort to keep up with the athletic children in football. I would always land with a rather hefty bang, assess the situation, ignore the laughs from my classmates and begin picking the gravel out of my knees and palms. I would constantly worry about telling my mother that “I’d done it again”. She tried valiantly to patch up holes in the knees but after applying six or seven patches to the same pair of trousers she must have begun to think it was a rather futile exercise.
That was until June 2004, when I managed to rip my trousers so substantially and so severely that the ensuing embarrassment meant I have never divulged this information to anyone.
In summer 2004, Newcastle was enjoying an unexpected burst of warm weather. I was in the lower sixth form and was clinically obese. I make this point, not to generate sympathy, but more to put the story into some sort of context and to possibly give some sort of an explanation as to how I found myself in this pickle.
You could always tell when it was hot at school as were allowed to remove our ties and undo our top buttons on our shirts. This always resulted in some of the less mature students either tying them to their heads like drunken relatives at a wedding or pretending to strangle each other. For more mature students like me, we lazed around on the grass outside the common room, basking in our new open collared sense of freedom.
On the day in question, it was nearing midday and we had come to a general consensus that we were going to walk down the hill to the corner shop for our lunch. To exit the common room the correct way, we would normally have to walk the maze of corridors around the school. This was a problem for a variety of reasons: 1) we were lazy, 2) we might bump into a teacher, whose class we had recently not gone to, or 3) we might bump into a teacher, whose lesson we were planning not to go to. We therefore decided to take a shortcut and jump a waist high fence into the staff car park. One by one my friends vaulted over the fence. I rather nonchalantly strode up to the fence and hauled myself up and over. I landed and we walked off.
It was about thirty seconds later that I realised something was wrong. I don’t know what first alerted me to it. Maybe it was the cool breeze I could now feel kissing the back of my legs or maybe, just maybe it was that every one of my friends was now literally rolling on the floor, struggling to breathe, hysterically laughing at me. I felt down my leg as if I was searching myself at an airport to find the feeling of skin where there was once material. What surprised even me was the sheer severity of this new found slash in my trousers. Ordinarily, I would rip my trousers and create a hole roughly the size of a squash ball, but upon inspection this rip carried on and on and on.
I soon established I had ripped my trousers from just below the zip at the front all the way up to the waistband at the back. Whichever way I write this story, it will never do that rip justice. My arse was literally just hanging out. Amidst the incessant laughter, I furiously tried to think of a plan. My friends were no use at all, to the point where they carried on walking to the shop, leaving me to fend for myself, helpless, with just a flimsy cotton layer of boxer shorts hiding my remaining dignity from the world.
I shirked off as covertly as I could back into school. My plan was to sweet talk the textiles teacher into fixing my trousers, walk triumphantly back into the common room and laugh it off as some hilarious and whimsical jape.
I wish I could tell you that this was what happened.
I successfully made it to the textiles room without too many second glances. Fortunately the teacher was there and after composing herself following a brief bout of frenzied laughter, she agreed to help me. I stood there, trouser-less, as she ran what would now be classified as two separate garments through the sewing machine.
She finished the job about thirty minutes later. I victoriously strode up to her, arms outstretched to take the finished product. The teachers face turned a deepish shade of red as I walked across the classroom. Unperturbed I continued until I was stood directly in front of her. It was only then that I realised that from beneath the flimsy layer of cotton, something that should never be seen was now directly on show. For those of you not blessed with the ability to read between the lines I shall explain it clearly; I was now stood in front of a teacher, willy out.
From there on in it didn’t really matter what I did or what I said. Once you expose yourself to a teacher, what else can you do? I did the dignified thing and ran.
Unsurprisingly, the teacher didn’t really speak to me much after that. I found any and every reason to never visit the textiles room again. I finished school just over a year later and had managed to keep this story hidden for eight years.
You may be wondering why I chose to eventually divulge this story online for everyone to see. Apart from hopefully making you chuckle slightly at my expense, it is my hope that by some twist of fate or circumstance the above mentioned teacher may someday read this.
If that is you, please know that for standing in front of you in June 2004 with my willy hanging out I am truly, deeply and sincerely sorry.
Robbie
woefullyunderprepared 
Very, very funny!