The Writing On The Wall

  Mr. Cooper is a c***.  Or so it says on the wall at the front of school in red emulsion, capital letters and six feet high.  As end of year pranks go, it is right up there.  I am still not exactly sure who is responsible, but have a pretty good idea.  You have to hand it to them, they had taken a risk getting up in the early hours to paint that up and you could see it from everywhere.  The daring deed must have been caught on CCTV no doubt and I sensed that everything was about to implode. At least they had remembered to call him mister, otherwise the whole thing would have seemed a bit disrespectful to the school principal.  I went to have a look at the scene of the crime before school and it was a pretty gruesome piece of work.  The paint had started to run by that time and made it look almost as though it had been daubed onto the brickwork with the victim's own blood.  Make no mistake, this was an act of revenge.  Whilst swearing is not big or clever, I must confess to having thought the same thing many times before now about Mr C., but never quite felt the need to express that opinion in writing, or quite so publicly.  After all, everyone knew him by reputation. This had been brewing for a long while.  He had cancelled the year eleven ball, he had fired Dr Pugh, my favourite teacher for unknown reasons and then he had hit Mark Williamson with a corner flag, or so rumour had it. Cooper had it coming to him and he was not a first time offender.

  I heard Coops raging about it, just before we went in to assembly.  His chubby little face turned pink with rage at the suggestion of someone 'removing that awful graffiti, right this minute'.
“ No!” boomed fatso in reply, the rolls wobbling all the while around his neck “leave it up there, it shows they respect me”. 

  What a very warped take on it all, but still his reaction is one of the funniest things about it. He actually wanted that to be left up there for everyone to read. Nathan and Charlie Weston were marched into the Head's Office for interrogation as the usual suspects.  But they must be innocent.  There was absolutely no way either could have come up with a grammatically correct sentence like that and made no spelling mistakes.  The writing was even quite neat.

  As payback for this defamation, Cooper treated us to an extra long talk in assembly, with a king-sized telling off at the very end, cap it all.  I was not really listening, but his eyes popped out every time he came to a word like 'vandalism' or 'offensive', which at least provided some entertainment.  It was pretty dark in the assembly hall, but you could still make out Cooper's big moustache in the gloom, silhouetted against the rest of his face.  All I could think of was getting out of there and the holidays starting.  Perhaps I should have shown him some kind of charity, but then perhaps he should have shown everyone else some kind of respect, instead of barking at every living thing, man, woman, or child that crossed his path, like it has done something to offend him.  Seriously, that fat, old walrus was caught up entirely in his own little power trip.