There was always someone who decided that their life would be vastly improved by adopting a cool nickname of their choosing. The idea was that news of your new moniker would spread through the halls of the school, and by lunchtime everyone would know you by your new, cool nickname. The problem was that most people chose something lame like 'mad max' or 'LL Cool J.' Sigh.

I know someone who still signs off text messages (a thing which tells you who the sender is anyway) with "JD". I think he's hoping it'll catch on, in a sexy, Jack Daniels, James Dean sort of way.
I hope he doesn't read this. Sorry James.

Even sadder, and slightly worrying, is that a friend of mine took the idea of 'cool nickname' slightly too literally and decided that when he was introduced to people as 'Joel', he inform them that his name was 'Cool Guy'.

In year seven, Phillip Anderson tried to spread the word that his new nickname was "Tomahawk". Yeah, right. This nickname lasted for the whole of thirty seconds, whereas the nickname that we assigned him, the far more accurate and descriptive "Penguin", lasted for years.

I know a senior academic at the British Museum who is still, at the age of 40-something, trying to convince people to call him JD in the hope that it will make him seem mean, moody and magnificent.
Rather than a spazz. Called Jeremy.

As a small child, my mum insisted on drying my hair with a hair-dryer, and if my hair was clean and puffed up I'd refer to myself as "Goggins", after Mrs Goggins from Postman Pat.

About ten years later, a kid called Matthew joined our class from another school. A friend and I were asked to take him under our wing, and we soon found that Matthew had problems. He had special springy shoelaces as he couldn't tie normal ones, and he would constantly blurt out facts like "the earth expands three centimetres every day".

We tried to be kind to Matthew, but in the end we gave up in light of his fact-puking and general spazziness. And when I realised his hair style was sufficiently puffy for him to take on the mantle of "Goggins", it came to pass that the whole year, and then the whole school, knew him as "Goggins".

I like to think that one day the new "Goggins" will, as I did, retire to anonymity and choose a successor.

My mate Rat and I went to school with a kid called Matthew Davies. Due to his fey mannerisms, girly hair and weedy physique we called him "Pune".
After several years of taunting he broke down and talked to his parents about it. They suggested that he should stick up for himself and tell us he didn’t want to be called “Pune” any more. The conversation went like this:

Pune: I don’t want to be called Pune any more.
Us: Oh?
Pune: From now on I want you to call me "the Hornet".

I believe that’s when I threw a rock at his head.