It took a long time for it to sink in. Too long. Far too long. The first boy came onto the bus with what appeared to be plasters stuck all over his face. had the had a bad morning while shaving? Then a second boy followed, and a third. Had there been a job lot of poor quality razors for sale in the town that week? Then there was a girl, followed by another girl. So the shaving theory had to be discounted.
The next schoolchild thought I was a dimwit as I examined his plasters more closely. It was then it twigged. The plasters weren't plasters. They were stickers emblazoned with:
DO SOMETHING FUNNY FOR MONEY
Then I noticed that all the students had red hair, or red fingernails or red clothes.
"It's not Red Nose Day is it?" I asked and received a chorus of "Durrrr's" in response. I was probably the only person on the planet who was not entering into the spirit of Comic Relief. But I was in luck. An angry looking teacher was frog marching a boy towards the bus. His face was thunderous and there was no comedy to be seen anywhere on it.
"If you can't behave like an adult and have sunk to the depths of....." His voice tailed off as he walked past the bus door, shoving the down-at-mouth boy up the steps. He was a new teacher. I hadn't seen him before, but had noticed he had various nose and ear piercings. Maybe he had been at The Stranglers concert the other night. He looked like most of the audience.
So I said to one of the children: "What's that teacher called, I haven't seen him before?"
"Dickhead," came a voice from the back.
"Well that's not very nice," said another.
"He's not very nice,"came the voice from the back. Whether it was the boy who had a run-in with Mr Dickhead, I wasn't sure. I couldn't see properly.
The moral of the story is you don't need to watch hours of over indulgent stars on BBC1 trying to be funny in the name of charity. You just need to be on the average school bus.
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