The two most laddish lads in our year were Alastair and Mark (whose surnames I can't bring myself to reveal as I'm still a bit scared of them - old lynchings die hard). Both, in keeping with the times, wore those heavy lineny shirts, their ties as small as possible and with as much tucked in between their shirt buttons as possible, one gold earring, school trousers generously cut with many a dart at the waistband, and Kickers. You get the picture. Both were (looking back) suspiciously well-coiffed; Alastair with his blonde, rock-hard flat-top à la Bros, and Mark with the tight spiral perm he sported for much of the fifth form and lower sixth (perhaps, with hindsight, an indicator of things to come). They were inseperable.
To be clear: they weren't from the pikey/charver/radgie school of bullies - no, those were confined to the B stream and mainly restricted their murderous attacks to unfortunates from own kind. Alastair and Mark were the middle class type of bully, whose style of misery-infliction was made infinitely worse by their middling intelligence, which allowed them to systematically destroy the self-esteem of their chosen victims in a way that others deemed hilariously funny, and even their victims came to believe themselves rightful targets of what was usually a heady and unpredictable combination of evil hilarity and utter disdain.
As is not unusual between the ages of 13 and 17, their favourite targets for vilification were anyone deemed to be a 'hom'. For these unfortunates they reserved their worst and most sustained mental bullying campaigns. There are some, guilty of nothing more than being good at art, whose lives were made an utter misery, and who still live in the shadow of being made to feel like so much shit on this gruesome twosome's shoes.

Which makes their current state of complete gayness all the more startling.
There are those who will say, quite rightly, that the signs were always there - the hair, the earrings, the inseperability, the protesting waaaay too much about suspected gayers. But at the time it was completely inconceivable that they might be secret bum-chums. They went out with half the female population of our year. They were always getting sucked off in French or on the back seat of the coach. They were, in short, horrible, chauvenist, unreconstructed 80s spivs.
News of their subsequent volte-face came about via FriendsReunited, and rarely has an entire ex-school community been so awestruck. There was anger, there were tears, there is laughter still.
But one has to wonder: did they really know all along, in which case their treatment of other woofters, real or imagined, is all the more unforgiveable, or did they discover their prediliction for bum-love only in later years? Will schadenfreude intervene and cause them to be vilified as they vilified others? Will they discover an activist streak and become vocal protestors for gay rights? And when exactly did they first exchange sex wee*?
* Got to be the ski trip. It all makes sense now.

Even if it's not a law of nature that bullies will eventually turn out to be screaming mincers (or single mothers), it's so satisfying when it happens that you really want it to be.

Consider James Bain. A fat and extremely angry young man given to punching other kids and arguing with teachers, he was expelled from two secondary schools. Last seen working full-time in a motorway service station selling £3 Santana CDs with outlandishly gay relish.

He informed me one girl who, by the age of 24 had scored three children - one from a squaddie. Once attractive and stuck-up, now fat and given to trawling Friends Reunited, trying to strike up old non-friendships.

I think I feel justified in saying "Ha!" to the lot of them.