Don't f**k with my mother
Once, back in the mists of time before adulthood, I was a very small six year-old boy. I had moved schools about a year earlier and, frankly, was having a bit of a miserable time. I missed my old friends, was lacking in any kind of social skills and, as I had switched midway through the primary school process almost everyone knew each other and decided, quite quickly, that they didn't like me.

There was one particular boy called Michael who made my life a misery. On top of being pretty evil to me when given the chance he told everyone that I had germs (this was primary school and presumably "Rectum Ranger" had not yet entered common vocabulary) and this led to widespread mockery and refusal to sit next to me in class, reducing me to the lowest point of my young life (cue muffled sobs).

Eventually, after much crying and refusing to go to school, my mum wheedled out of me that I was being pretty severely bullied and that Michael was the culprit. She, in her inimitable way, decided to take her own form of direct action.

The next day she took me into school and had me point young Michael out. She then walked over to him and, in a sweet parental kind of way, asked if she could sit down and talk to him. He agreed and she started by saying that she had heard that we had been having problems and that he was being mean to me and she wanted resolve this. She then proceeded to explain that my dad was a dentist and that, unless he stopped being mean to me this very second, he would "come into school tomorrow and slowly rip all his fucking teeth out".

I have never seen in my whole life seen such a look of pure fear and terror even on an adult, let alone on the face of a six-year old boy. All this was within full view of my teacher and delivered in soft soothing parental tones.

I feared the backlash but Michael took this warning to heart and made it his personal mission to be my very best friend for the rest of my time at that school. We never discussed it so I never learnt if he had a change of heart or whether he was just terrified of getting on the wrong side of me. I bet he's still got a phobia of dentists though.

Somehow I don't think you'd be able to get away with that these days...

My mum was pretty scary when she wanted to be though. She once physically threatened an NYPD officer who tried to stop her getting Brooke Shields' autograph for me, and made him back down too. I didn't even know who she was.

No apologies for length - I was six so I'm guessing a cocktail sausage had one over me
(Robin of the Hood isn't into the whole brevity thing, Thu 10 Sep 2009, 19:52, Reply)