A game devised to administer pain on an individual by as many people as possible (whoever's there at the time). The game can be initiated for many reasons, such as birthday's, new shoes, new haircut etc, in fact it was a generic game used in place of the traditional methods of distributing pain to any fellow pupils who deserved it at the time (bumps for birthday, christening for new shoes etc). We soon realised that the game was so much fun we couldn't just wait until there was a special occasion to play it so we devised a rule where the last person to get to the playing field at any break time got 'Kiddy in the Middle'. This allowed us to master out techniques and we all became pretty efficient Kiddy in the Middlers quite quickly.nnThe game consisted of the chosen one lying down in a circle made by all the other participants and then having to stand up whilst everyone else kicked them as hard as they could to keep them down. The kicking would stop as soon as the 'Kiddy in the middle' was stood up (which isn't easy to do when your arms are kicked away as soon as you put any pressure on it to left yourself up). There were no real rules to this game but there did seem to be an unwritten rule where you wouldn't kick anybody in the face. This of course wasn't always upheld but most people obeyed through fear of having their teeth kicked out the next time it was their go.nnOne of my favourite memories of school was when we played Kiddy in the middle with Ben Caddy, who was officially the school bully, on his birthday. We had a huge crowd for the occasion and you could see in Ben's eyes that he knew he about to get the kicking of his lifetime. He couldn't back out as he was one of the main instigators of the game and he couldn't be seen to not be able to take what he gives out but he also knew that the normal Kiddy in the Middle etiquette was out of the window and there were one (or maybe fifteen) too many old scores about to be settled for his liking. We gave Ben a severe kicking and it was wonderful to see the kids who owed Ben a kick or two, but didn't want to upset him through fear of retaliation, join in as well once they realised that there was no way he would know they were involved with the blur of legs and DM's flying in left right and centre.nnBen came away pretty beat up and had plenty of bruises, a few nice cuts (the one to his lip I like to take credit for but it's impossible to say for sure) but my favourite injury he suffered was the black marks all over his body where the rubber had been rubbed of peoples shoes and onto his skin. It took him a while to scrub those off.nnAhhhh, happy days.