ZOMBIE knives in the news make you feel pathetically cosseted and middle-class. But by tweaking the facts, you too can have the benefits of a rough upbringing:
Turf wars
To the credulous, sounds like a battle for territory between drug gangs. But a feeble scuffle in Congleton park between representatives of two rival schools, resulting in one being pinned to the floor within a minute and having his bag thrown on a shed roof, still counts. Although your opponent could exercise Machiavellian cunning and not turn up.
Knives at school
It’s no lie that you were sternly warned off bringing knives to school and kids you knew carried them. Usually penknives, but you would treat the dull, 6cm blade of Gareth’s Swiss Army knife with the same awe as an Uzi. Could it be used to kill? Theoretically. Given time. Though it may be easier to snip them to death with the tiny, tiny scissors.
The posse had guns
Oh, several kids you knew had guns. Yeah. Admittedly air rifles which, while dangerous to eyeballs and frogs, tend not to be favoured by cocaine importers but still. And the five-minute reload time means drive-by shootings took hundreds of passes and left the victims badly bruised.
Terrace weaponry
There was always a twat like Marcus showing you how to turn a Coke can into a slashing weapon (fold it, obviously), sharpening a 50p or making the infamous skinhead weapon of a newspaper tightly folded to make a rock-hard corner which is painful to be hit with. Marcus did not at any point run with any local firms. He’s a feng shui consultant now.
Everyone was in a gang
Omitting that these were primary school gangs recreating the adventures of the Famous Five, or the Red Hand Gang for daredevils, and they ended badly. There were no smugglers, no kidnappers, and the den you build got trashed by 14-year-olds. Essentially you sat in bushes.
You knew dealers
Both technically true and pleasingly reminiscent of Top Boy. Just change the drug from ‘25 keys of uncut Colombian’ to ‘a sixteenth of Moroccan black Steve got off his hippy brother’ and you were practically hanging with Tony Montana. And you can still roll a smokeable joint one out of five tries.
