Twenty years ago, when Simon was a whippersnapper presenter on BBC Radio 1, he received thousands of letters from listeners confessing their darkest secrets and worst misdemeanours, begging for his forgiveness. Every day, Father Mayo read out a confession - and then he'd decide whether to grant forgiveness or not.

Read a classic Confession below, then Send Simon Your Confession

Dear Simon,

After many years of deep shame, I feel compelled to confess a dreadful crime which I committed as a youth some twenty years ago against a purveyor of knowledge in my local learning establishment. It took place in the United States, but my guilt is so strong that I can no longer turn away.

I was twelve years ago, and living in a very small Midwestern town. Although I was a decent student, the bane of my life (and of the entire school for that matter) was a teacher named Mr Pearce. He was a dreadful man, about a trillion years old, stone deaf, half blind, and in the throes of advanced madness. He regularly marked students down for not attending classes when they were actually there - he just couldn't see or hear them. His grading system worked purely on the principle that whoever could be the biggest bootlicker got the best grades. On one occasion Mr Peace gave the entire class (myself included) an assignment to complete, an essay on America Government in the 1800s, and the class duly turned in the assignment one week later. The next day we were shocked to learn that he failed all of us, saying that we had all written about the wrong subject! He claimed that the assignment was on the Spanish-American War. This was too much to take - we protested to the school authorities. How could thirty four people all be wrong and just one (Mr Pearce) be right? Our protests were to be in vain, however, as they knew what a nasty man Mr Pearce was, and tackling him over the issue was more than their jobs were worth. All of us then had to explain to our parents why we had failed - needless to say they found the explanations hard to believe and we suffered various forms of purgatory. I vowed then and there that ultimate vengeance would be mine.

It was about this time that an advertisement was appearing on television for the Volkswagen Beetle. Since Mr Pearce drove one, I had grown to hate them (and still do for that matter). In the commercial, a man demonstrated how well assembled they were by driving one into a lake, and showing that it floated. I would have dearly loved to have done this with Mr Pearce's car, but I was too short to even reach the pedals, and there was no way that I was going to steal a car anyway. And that's when it dawned on me - if Volkswagen Beetles were so well assembled that they floated because they wouldn't let water leak in...

That night I went round to Mr Pearce's house with my trusty screwdriver and forced the window of his Beetle down a few inches. Working quickly, I grabbed the garden hose from in front of his house, placed the nozzle through the window and turned on the water full blast. Thirty nervous minutes later the deed was done - the car completely filled with water, frame resting on the ground. And it worked! It didn't leak out at all! I decided to complete the effect - I ran home, took two of my pet goldfish from their tank, ran back and put them through the window and into the car. It was clear that they loved their new home, and it was a remarkable sight to behold.

The next day at school was one I will never forget. Late morning, the entire school was called into the assembly hall for an announcement. Mr Pearce was in hospital! Overnight, someone had filled his car with water, and when he attempted to evacuate the water by opening the door, he was knocked down by a Beetle-size wave, hit his head on the pavement and had been knocked unconscious! I felt sick - but when they said he should recover in a few days, this changed to total satisfaction. This event proved to be the final straw in his teaching career - Mr Pearce never came back, taking retirement on grounds of nervous exhaustion. This might well have been influenced by the fact that the incident was extensively covered in the local newspaper (front page, no less) under the headline 'Teacher's Teutonic Tidal Wave Terror'.

I don't want Mr Pearce's forgiveness, as the old misery richly deserved his soaking, but seek absolution from goldfish lovers everywhere for bringing the lives of two scaly surfers to a premature if somewhat spectacular end. Forgiven?

Fishing for forgiveness,

Awash with regrets.

P.S. Although his car was fixed (eventually), he was on a water meter and ended up paying for the hundred of gallons used in the process. Am I still forgiven?