It happens.

I didn’t have many close friends in secondary school, but I got on well with nearly everyone - there were very few people I wasn’t on decent terms with. Well enough that if nobody in my village was going out on the piss in the local town, I could head in myself, walk into a pub, and know someone to go and chat to.

This probably pins me to a particular age bracket, but when I grew up there were the Trendies (people who liked dance music, the club scene, and R&B while it became popular) and the Grungers (the crowd that loved heavy rock, metal, and grunge funnily enough), and the two groups never really met in the middle. I got on well with loads of folk in both camps and never really got pigeonholed as one nor the other.

The included the hardest lads in the year group, the absolute lunatics who were on the gear even at school age, scrapped in the playground, and spent more time in detention than in class. A couple of them collared me privately and told me “remember, if anyone needs sorting out, give me a shout and I’ll kick fuck out of them for you”.

It was a favour I thankfully never felt the need to call in, but it was handy knowing that I wasn’t going to be on the business end of getting a doing off one of them.

…Seen it happen when a favoured teacher at a school I worked at got his car keyed. The students worked out who keyed it, and all hell broke loose…