I was sent a link to this book extract by a friend who used to attend Stamford High School, which is the sister school of the place I used to go to. As my friend put it:

It’s funny how the two schools have inspired books in close succession - scarred people for life, more like!

The other book she was referring to was Swinesend, which is in many places inspired by my five years at Stamford School. But where I (and my co-authors) created a savage send up of public school life and maintained the stiff upper lip, Rae Earl takes a very different line.

She used to be fat, you see. And if the one cardinal sin at my school was being common (’fucking little pleb’), the worst thing any girl at the High School could do was be an unshaggable pile of blubber. And that was in the eyes of her peers, rather than those of the boys up the hill. I expect it’s pretty much the same now.

That’s why what, at first glance, appears to be a self-indulgent teenager’s diary, strikes a note with me: I know those schools intimately, and am wearily familiar with the repulsive and unimaginative attitudes that are worn as a badge of pride by many pupils. God, how this prime slice of Stamfordian intellectualism brought back memories.

Fab at school today. Daisy got bollocked for spelling “Satan” “Saturn” all through her essay. And this is someone who reckons she is going to apply for Cambridge. Good luck, love!!

My favourite bit, though, has to be when Rae pops in to Stamford School to see her first ever boyfriend who, naturally not wanting to be seen with a fat bird, has done the decent thing and dumped her.

Yes, Harry thing completely buggered. I went down to his study in his boarding house. He was acting dead strangely - showing me his bloody A-level English essay (it was shit! The first line said, “All great books have a beginning, a middle and an end …” Errr … yeah, but what’s that got to do with Jane Austen?) so I took the piss slightly only as a joke. Then he got really odd and asked if I’d always been big.

Superb. A sixth former who’d grasped that books have a beginning, a middle and an end. Probably an exhibitioner, if not a scholar. Rae continues:

Then HONESTLY this happened:

H: “I feel like I have been pushed into this.”

Me: “Pardon?”

H: “People said that you liked me and I felt pressured into getting off with you and asking you out.”

The classic tactic: make sure she thinks it’s her fault. Besides, she’s only fat, so it won’t matter.

Tragic stuff. I’ll almost certainly read the lot when it’s published, and it’ll make me wince page by page.

What I do want to know, though, is whether she includes the fine school disco story about the boy and the girl who were (by my reckoning) in the year below her. It was told to me by friends of a handsome boy I knew, Pete White, who was never happier than when hearing someone else telling it in his presence.

Just in case Rae misses it out, what happened was simple enough. One of the awful official discos in the main hall at Stamford School was drawing to an end. As was usual, the lights were dimmed for the last, slow song, as hormonal young couples thrust their tongues down each others’ throats and discreetly positioned schoolmasters watched (rather more keenly than necessary) from the sides of the room.

One couple were necking particularly enthusiastically, and the boy involved could hardly believe his luck. Then, in a snap, the lights went on, the girl looked lovingly into in his face and, a millisecond after staring into his eyes, slapped him brutally round the face.

“You’re not Peter White,” she screamed.

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