Meaningless, meaningless

I'd just like to state, for the record, that I invented this game.  I don't know if you ever played it -- it was a staple of the Leicestershire playground by the time I got to secondary school -- but it was me that started it.

I remember it well.  In the break at Saturday morning orchestra, a bunch of us girls were playiing bog standard tig-off-ground -- the basic principle, for the uninitiated, being that standing on an object renders you exempt from being tug.  There were several small fixed benches we were using as den, and someone else was "it".  In a moment of genius I shall never surpass, I jumped up onto the bench where Charlie Playle was standing, pushed her off and shouted, "Budge!".  

And thus a new game was born.   No longer were you safe in your off-ground den -- at any time you could be removed from it by someone jumping on and budge-ing you.  A whole new level of tig-off-ground.

It might not have been Charlie Playle, in all fairness.  But she seems a likely candidate being as she attended both Saturday morning orchestra and my secondary school.  On my first week there, when I was being asked repeatedly whether I was a boy or a girl, I told her I was a boy and that my name was Thomas.  Hilarity ensued as it turned out I was in her games group and she helpfully ried to stop me getting in the girls' changing room.   But that's another story.