Being a shower of cheap bastards, our school made us buy our own recorders. Anyone turning up without one was forced to play one of the special school recorders. These were nasty, communal, wooden recorders that had had all the lacquer abraded off them by year after year of applications of schoolkid spit. As a result, they were always unpleasantly damp. So, if you played one, you would, of course, catch AIDS from it, particularly if you had chapped lips.

If you refused to play it, our freakishly large music teacher would stand silently in front of your seat, his groin at the level of your face, with his mouth hanging open in a vaguely sexual way until you started playing.

Naturally, this would also give you AIDS, chapped lips or no. We didn't forget our recorders very often.