Ways we hurt each other

At around the age of puberty, boys of the Loch/Korumburra region used to delight in inflicting pain on each other. These are the ones my brother taught me:

• The ear-flick: Curl your second finger (adjacent to the index) behind your thumb like a coiled spring. Approach your victim from behind and use it to flick his ear. This is especially effective on cold and frosty mornings.

• The muscler: Bend your fingers to make an open handed fist, and with a chopping motion, bring down your knuckles onto your victim's arm just below the shoulder. If you do it a few times you can be rewarded with a bruise.

• The ruler flick: Take a standard issue foot-long wooden school ruler and when your victim is bending over, for example at a lower locker, hold the ruler like a sword and swing it down in a slicing motion so that it just nicks your victim's buttocks. Take care that the contact is just enough so that it causes maximum pain without tearing your victim's trousers or embedding the ruler in his flesh.

• The nipple twist: Take  your victim's nipple between thumb and folded index finger, squeeze tightly and twist. An added embellishment is to tell your victim that this causes male breast cancer.

• The corky: Approach your victim from the side, and when close, bring up your knee so that it impacts the upper leg quadriceps muscle. A measure of effectiveness is that your victim is unable to pursue you as you flee.

• The pencil tattoo: Take a standard black lead pencil, sharpen it to a fine point and jab it into your victim's quadriceps through his trousers. It leaves a black dot that lasts a lifetime.

• Knucklers: This is a game played between two boys. Each player makes a fist with his right hand. You stand facing your opponent, fists touching each other. When it's your turn, you must quickly try and rap your opponent's fist with your knuckles before he can pull his fist out of the way. If you miss, it becomes your opponent's turn. When it's your turn, you can twitch your fist slightly, to trick your opponent into pulling his fist out of the way. If you can trick him three times in a row, you get a free whack at the top of your opponent's fist and he mustn't pull it away.