I watched Ze Frank this morning:

…which is always fun and occasionally thought provoking, a bit like poking your tongue into a gap where a tooth used to be and feeling the hole and trying to remember what the tooth used to feel like.

Of course I’ve still got all my adult teeth, so it’s a bit more like a memory of remembering that.

The latest show is about those little vignettes of childhood horror imposed by others – I have a few of those myself. It brought one back fairly sharply.

I was in 4th or 5th Grade, aged 9 or 10 – I was a year younger than everyone else, several inches taller than everyone else, stronger than everyone else, more well-read then everyone else and spoke funny (or as I now call it: was English) – and frankly I was bored.

I had made the teacher quite angry about something; maybe I’d “talked back at them” – argued, questioned something – or maybe I’d said something to another kid. So the teacher got a roll of masking tape and taped me into my chair – a couple of times around the body and then another piece across my mouth to stop me talking.

The thing that I remember most clearly was my complete blank incomprehension about what this was meant to achieve. All I had to do was shrug to break the tape around my chest, and I remember working out that I could run my tongue over my lower lip which made the glue melt, leaving me with a kind of amusing, masking-tape moustache.

I had no concept that this was meant to be a punishment, or to shame me, or to actually stop me doing anything. I had no concept of what this was meant to achieve at all – it was as if the teacher had decided to involve me some piece of avant-garde performance art.

I can’t credit the American education system with enough wit to use mild confusion as a mechanism of control so I presume it must have been meant as a punishment – but as punishments go, the ones you don’t understand are meant to be punishing you are probably the best.

But in the long term it does make you disrespect the system. Long-term, probably beneficial.

And when we came back to Britain – me aged 10 – that’s when I learned what hell was.

Hell was other children.

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