Almost as important as sport were the friendships we made in __1__ times between lessons. We would go onto the __2__ and play games like “fives”, a sort of squash but using the hand to hit the ball rather than a racket. Or we would sit in groups on the grass and talk about our favourite pop singers and learnedly __3__ the meanings of the __4__ of the latest David Bowie songs. Of my school friends I only keep in touch with one of them now. Then I had many __5__: Graham “Gunner” Gunning, who was tall and thin and who later went to work in a bank; Malcolm “Jock” McKay, who was not Scottish at all, who __6__ school in his final year and went to live in Paris; and Stephen “Slim” Allen, a very fat boy, who was the __7__ in the class, always playing tricks on the __8__ and the other boys. I bumped into him by chance a couple of years ago in the street. He had married right after leaving school and had had three children, but then had got __9__ and was living __10__ in a tiny flat near the railway station. He was still as fat as ever.