tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48385879290012034712024-03-05T07:45:30.434+00:00Confessions Of A Dangerous MinorHow to make health and safety wince. Tales of growing up in the 70s and 80s...or what not to do if you want to reach adulthood.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-23420856516531870352010-04-08T15:32:00.004+00:002010-04-08T15:38:30.615+00:00Deathmatch<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHKnUhe3djzB9xaiHhrlQYUVpKuRS71dMD8nV6sYan4AxkBfHlNY_G7BTLboRxI6GSvgdiRE37RJdpZ3cxtN7MnA3cNApmGkQ1dtWTAg_9_pjg0vfRDJRJs3nBdhmAZEMXAIjkTRZ9QQw/s1600/cricket+ball.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5457790395430240114" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 300px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 225px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHKnUhe3djzB9xaiHhrlQYUVpKuRS71dMD8nV6sYan4AxkBfHlNY_G7BTLboRxI6GSvgdiRE37RJdpZ3cxtN7MnA3cNApmGkQ1dtWTAg_9_pjg0vfRDJRJs3nBdhmAZEMXAIjkTRZ9QQw/s320/cricket+ball.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;">As mentioned several times on here, sport was an important part of school life and it took a lot to get games lessons cancelled. During the winter you could expect to be forced to play football or rugby on pitches that were either as hard as concrete or so wet that entire teams went missing, sucked down into the depths only to emerge years later like bog bodies clad in ‘House’ colours. Summer was however, different.</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:100%;">Summer sports involved cricket and athletics and our cricket field was also used by the county side as a training ground so the groundsman was less than happy to have sixty lads tearing up his beautiful turf should the weather be a bit on the damp side. Thus on those days when it was chucking it down we would find ourselves confined to the school gyms and the game of potential violent death that was indoor cricket.</span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">Indoor cricket was simple…and deadly. You had two chairs acting as wickets, a full size cricket bat and a tennis ball. In order to score runs you had to hit the ball somewhere in the hall. So far, so simple…but what about the deadly part? Somewhere over the years the rules had been amended a little. Rumour had it this had occurred in 1975 and coincided with the release of the film ‘Rollerball’. Not only did you score points by running back and forth between the wickets but points were also awarded for how many of the opposing team were put out of action. This could be achieved by scything their legs from under them in a sliding attempt to reach the wicket before the ball or by giving the ball a hard enough thwack to turn it into a deadly missile that ricocheted off walls and into the backs of the fielding teams heads. A massive ten points was awarded for hitting the right hand top panel of the gymnasium doors which meant that the ball had to be hit with some force at roughly head height causing bowlers and fielders to hit the floor rather than risk decapitation by a manky old tennis ball.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">It was always possible to tell which year had been on ‘wet games’ as at 3.30pm they would stagger from the gym holding handkerchiefs to bleeding noses or wads of wet paper towels to already swollen eyes. A few would even emerge disconsolately holding a dislodged tooth in the hope that their parents knew a really good dentist.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">Thus it was that one particularly soggy summer day in 1980 we found ourselves in the school gym and forced to take part in the orgy of violence and bloodshed that was indoor cricket. The games teacher had left us to it and had returned to the comfort of the P.E masters room no doubt to catch up with the papers and have a crafty slug of the Scotch we knew was kept in the filing cabinet.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">We had been playing for about an hour. The bodies were already piling up on the mats at the back of the gym. There were at least two minor concussions, a split lip, a black eye and Toby was curled into a ball clutching his groin. However, we had just bowled the other team out to three falls and a submission and we were in to bat. Being half decent players and not having suffered any debilitating wounds during our fielding my kindly team mates volunteered Andy and I to go in to bat first.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">Andy got the first ball. BLAT! Beautiful two wall ricochet that ended up in the middle of Micks back winding him for the few vital seconds to allow a run to be scored. Next ball. THWAP! Near miss that caused Trev’ to duck but was insanely fielded by Clive. Andy was out, next man in was Toby, still walking a bit funny from his earlier encounter with the ball. WHUMP! Deflection from the bars that left Clive with a bleeding nose and in the scramble to reach the wicket Toby took down Simon the opposition bowler with what looked like a sliding tackle culminating with a poke to the stomach with the bat.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">…and so it continued. I had managed to reach 35 runs, we had whittled the other team down to seven fielders but Pete and I were the last remaining batsmen in and we were 12 points down. Pete was not a great player so it looked to be down to me. Gavin was bowling and launched a vicious bouncer in my direction. THUMP! By some miracle bat and ball connected and the ball zinged to the corner of the gym and we scored two runs. Ten points down. The next ball, an equally fast and vicious bouncer was hit and bounced off a couple of walls. Another two points were made and by this time the rest of the team were yelling encouragement. In fact they were yelling quite loudly. Loudly enough to rouse the games master from his paper in the P.E masters room. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">Back in the hall I was ready for Gavins next bouncer, he launched the ball and I saw a chance. THWACK! Straight as a die the ball rocketed towards the gym doors. Ten points! Oh yes! Errr! No! With impeccable timing, the games master opened the door and my ten point ball smacked into his chin with an audible CRUNCH! He stood for a couple of seconds and then went down as if pole-axed and my cricket whites nearly went brown. Luckily Gavin who was a scout and had done his first aid badge ascertained that the games master was still alive and breathing.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">It was just as Gavin had announced his diagnosis that the headmaster arrived, having also been disturbed by the noise from the gym, to discover a crowd of boys, one of whom was holding a cricket bat standing over an unconscious teacher. If that wasn’t bad enough another group of boys was huddled on the gym mats trying to staunch bleeding noses, lips and other extremities with their cricket whites. ‘Lord of the Flies’ had nothing on that scene and it was almost possible to read his thoughts from the haunted look on his face. Should he go on or should he swiftly retreat, lock the doors and call the police, the army and possibly the local asylum as well?</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">Fortunately sanity prevailed and everything was soon sorted out. The school matron was called and arrived swiftly only smelling ever so slightly of medicinal brandy and between the headmaster and the hastily summoned head of maths the games master was carted off to the school medical room. Strangely we never got to play indoor cricket ever again. Wet games days were spent improving ourselves in the school library where the likelihood of sudden and violent death was a lot less… unless of course the librarian went a bit mental with the date stamp.</span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-54393051458245908572009-12-03T16:54:00.003+00:002009-12-03T17:01:24.693+00:00Nativity<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBXtkTwVO_M8ny8EgXtEJDu8oHBWLektJQwUCMyq0vDiipm6u5FzxGpqe50gbWhf-0Q2xLf_GaNKEuRrq7HFps4Srb0qX7nfJ-Ttss0D3Ajzms5BuBhDEBaM0ariJMjnfEeuhucXlv45A/s1600-h/nativity.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5411055101647385522" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 300px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 211px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBXtkTwVO_M8ny8EgXtEJDu8oHBWLektJQwUCMyq0vDiipm6u5FzxGpqe50gbWhf-0Q2xLf_GaNKEuRrq7HFps4Srb0qX7nfJ-Ttss0D3Ajzms5BuBhDEBaM0ariJMjnfEeuhucXlv45A/s320/nativity.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>The school nativity play was obviously one of the highlights of the year. It was a time when parents appeared to discover their inner religiousness and could be heard muttering “Oh Christ! It’s that time of year again!” and everyone from first year infants to second year juniors joined together to celebrate the birth of Jesus. </div><br /><div><br />For us kids it was a time to escape the boredom of normal afternoon lessons from the end of November to the big day itself as we rehearsed and practiced under the tutelage of Miss Dent, our somewhat earnest ‘Music and Movement’ teacher. </div><br /><div>The format of the play was pretty much set in stone, there wasn’t much scope for radical change, Miss Dent was not noted for her avant garde ideas and the Pythons had not come up with the ‘Life of Brian’ at that point. As it had been for years of school nativity plays and continues up to this day, Mary and Joseph go to Bethlehem, get put up in a stable filled with kids dressed in costumes vaguely resembling sheep and cows and the rocking horse from the pre-schoolers classroom disguised as a Donkey, are visited by shepherds aka more kids with their mums best tea towel on their heads, three wise men (more kids but those whose parents could make a better looking costume) and a bunch of angels (all the girls who failed to get the starring role of Mary in sheets and glittery wings made from coat hangers). At some point the infant Jesus is miraculously born, miraculously meaning skipping the childbirth thing lest it traumatise the parents and turns out to be a doll that lost an arm sometime round 1969 wrapped in a towel. All the kids sing some hymns in praise of this, the assembled parents go “Ahhhh!” and the teachers think “Thank God that’s over for another year!” and head home for a stiff gin. Not a lot can go wrong.</div><br /><div>Well, not a lot can go wrong unless you decide to add a squad of Roman soldiers to the mix as Miss Dent decided to do. It was quite an innocent idea really, to have three Roman soldiers stop the weary Joseph and Mary on the road to Bethlehem and ask who they were so that Joseph and Mary could introduce themselves to the audience. During rehearsals this went fine, the centurion played by Damian simply said “Halt! Who seeks entrance to Bethlehem?” and Joseph answered “Two tired travellers, Mary and Joseph from Gallillee” </div><br /><div>However, come the big day things did not quite work out so nicely. Part of it might have been my fault but much of the blame fell on Miss Dent and her quest for authenticity as she demanded that the Roman soldiers were armed with swords and spears to add to their military authority. Even aged seven I had a fair collection of toy weapons and two of these were modelled on the Roman Gladius so being the good schoolboy I was I volunteered them for the school play. I believe the rest of the class described it as ‘sucking up to the teacher’. That’s my part in the sorry debacle that followed. The rest of the blame fell squarely on Damian and Simon, the latter of whom was playing Joseph. A minor playground spat over some Matchbox cars had blown up into all out warfare with Damians ‘gang’ who happened to consist of the other two ‘soldiers’ and Simons gang constantly at each others throats.</div><br /><div>So, come the afternoon of the play the local church hall that was used was filled with parents and grandparents, some of whom had not had several large drinks before coming to numb them to the pain of a primary school nativity, most of the teachers who were wishing they had had several stiff drinks and of course the vicar. </div><br /><div></div><div>The lights were dimmed and the play began and began well with the Angel of the Lord beginning her narration and Mary and Joseph appearing from one side of the stage trudging their weary way to Bethlehem. It went quite well for about thirty seconds more until the Romans appeared. Costume problems meant that their breast plates and helmets were made out of cardboard covered with tinfoil so they looked less like Romans than a bunch of schoolkids who had gone a bit mental in the stationery cupboard. They were however, armed. Armed with my toy swords and a dangerous looking spear consisting of a cardboard point stuck to one of the caretakers broom handles.</div><br /><div>“Halt!” cried Damian in his best centurions voice…and then in a total deviation from the script demanded “Your papers please!” in his best impression of a boys war comic Gestapo officer. From where the rest of us were standing in the wings you could see teachers beginning to twitch.</div><br /><div>“Wha’? We haven’t got any papers.” Said Simon, confusion written on his face.</div><br /><div>“Then you’re not getting into Bethlehem. Push off!” replied Damian poking Simon with his sword.</div><br /><div>“Yes we are!” was Simons answer only to be told “No you’re not!” and rewarded with another poke of the sword. By now, the audience was beginning to pay attention, even the ones who had previously been planning to sleep off their several large whiskies. A number of the teachers had begun to move down the aisle.</div><br /><div>“Don’t poke me with that again or I’ll duff you up!” snapped Simon. Poke went the sword and all hell broke loose. Imagine the scene in ‘Gladiator’ when the Romans are doing battle with the Germanic hordes. It was like that with seven year olds. Simon jumped on Damian, Damians two mates jumped on Simon. The shepherds who consisted of three of Simons friends rushed on stage and began battering the Romans with their crooks and the Angel of the Lord who was Damians older sister jumped from her podium and began to lay into them yelling “Stop hitting my brother or I’ll bash you!” in a most un-angelic manner. Fists were flying, glittery wings, tea towels and cardboard armour were sailing to the four winds and Miss Dent looked like she was about to burst into tears as several of the other teachers waded in to separate the combatants and cart them off to the room at the back of the hall.</div><br /><div>With the loss of several of the leads the performance was doomed to conclude in a rather half hearted rendition of ‘Oh come all ye faithful’ by the non-combatants and afterwards we were sworn to “Never talk of this again!” by Miss Dent who was seen shortly afterwards buying several bottles of vodka in the local off licence. </div><br /><div>I never got my swords back either.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-75006082706937594722009-08-06T13:44:00.003+00:002009-08-06T13:59:10.088+00:00Stuntman<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFw0qz13oYSX5jDOEINF-MPkZyIjvl2qx99uCID9uxCxDURD6wp8CBzNiM7bKM9qtNCVXeWbVsvPEP1QDNUIxBBnb3pQm2rV7Yaj2d-sDsK4KsPFaosIlIWDGVWPD1SQkoSvQD1sADTUc/s1600-h/bmx.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5366847432053835810" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 300px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 199px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFw0qz13oYSX5jDOEINF-MPkZyIjvl2qx99uCID9uxCxDURD6wp8CBzNiM7bKM9qtNCVXeWbVsvPEP1QDNUIxBBnb3pQm2rV7Yaj2d-sDsK4KsPFaosIlIWDGVWPD1SQkoSvQD1sADTUc/s320/bmx.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>Public information films were all the rage during my formative years. Switch on the TV and between Robin Hood and Tomorrow People you could be told not to throw Frisbees at electricity pylons, lock yourself in the fridge, hurl yourself into unknown waters or muck about with farm machinery if you found yourself out in the countryside. Of course, having a best friend, Alastair who happened to live on a farm meant that most of us knew these warnings were for the townie kids who might see the countryside once in a lifetime. We already knew that you stayed away from pointy things, did not climb inside the threshing machine and did not press the big button marked ‘Do NOT press this big button if your friend has crawled inside the threshing machine (unless you want to turn them into four stone of mince)’. Oh and if these failed there was always Alastair’s dad who gave us dire warnings of what to expect if any of us did muck about with the machinery…he would most likely kill us himself and that included the one who had been minced, bailed, threshed or trampled by annoyed sheep as well. In fact, not only would he kill them but would drag their remains back home for their parents to kill as well.<br /><br />Thus it was with such a warning to stay away from the unlocked shed full of agricultural chemicals that nowadays would have a trainee suicide bomber salivating at the thought and an even bigger warning to stay away from the open cesspit that had been dug out and was waiting to be filled in that we found ourselves left alone with our bicycles in the farmyard one winter morning during the school holidays.<br /><br />So, what were we to do? It was too cold to go up to the old pigsty that we used as a den and Paul had to be home by lunchtime as his grandmother was coming to visit so cycling to town was out as well. We were still trying to decide when Alastair who had been kicking stones into the old cesspit suddenly announced “I bet I could jump that on my bike!” Naturally we tried to dissuade him with that age old method used by nine year olds of “Go on then!”, “Bet you can’t!”, “Give you this bag of Blackjacks if you do!”<br /><br />We had of course completely forgotten the dire warnings that his dad had given us less than half an hour earlier and having banished it from our thoughts, scouted around for something to make a ramp for Alastair to make his daredevil attempt. An old plank was dragged out of one of the outbuildings and set up against a pile of earth to one side of the excavation. Alastair cycled to the end of the yard and as we watched, pedalled as fast as he could. He hit the ramp perfectly, sailed into the air and…<br /><br />…performed a perfect landing on the other side earning himself a chorus of “You jammy sod!” and a crumpled bag of sweets that had seen better days. Then for the next fifteen minutes or so the rest of emulated his feat and we all cleared the pit every time until Paul announced “I’m going to try it from the other way” and of course we tried our utmost to put him off doing so with “Bet you can’t!”, “Give you the sweets if you do!” etc etc.<br /><br />So, the plank was moved to another pile of earth, this time at the end of the cesspit and Paul cycled to the top of the yard and as Alastair before him, pedalled furiously down towards the pit. He hit the plank and sailed across the 8’ gap to perform a perfect landing on the other side, not even suffering testicular trauma from the gear stick on his Raleigh Chopper which was a shame as that was what we had wanted to see. He was however, travelling quite fast having gained a fair speed from distance he had travelled in his run up and the slight slope of the yard. Also, it being winter and Alastairs’s dad having hosed the yard after bringing the cows in for milking in the early hours of the morning meant there was a large patch of ice and Paul hit it, skidding and losing control of his bicycle.<br /><br />We could only watch in stunned silence as he slid towards the wall of the milking shed and the by product of a largish herd of cows that lay waiting for Alastair’s dad to return with the tractor to remove it sometime after lunch. Boy and bicycle met manure pile and shed with a sickening SQUELCH…THUD…ARGH! Long seconds passed as we stared open mouthed as Paul picked himself up and tottered towards us resembling some nightmare creature from the bog and as usual, being the lovely, caring children we were, ran away screaming “Argh! Crapmonster!”<br /><br />However, that did not last for long as we realised we had to get away before Alastairs dad returned and discovered that we had disobeyed him. Not that the evidence of a bent bike in the middle of a pile of cow dung wasn’t enough to convict us in our absence. Ignoring that fact completely we cycled off rather hurriedly, propelling Paul ahead of us with a long stick from the hedgerow outside the farm gate until we reached his house…just as his grandmother arrived in a taxi to be presented not with the well scrubbed and well behaved young man she expected but by three urchins and a grandson liberally smeared in cow shit. Her face remains imprinted on my memory and the look that Pauls mum gave us indicated we would all soon find ourselves in much deeper shit than Paul had ever been in.<br /><br />Still, at least we did not go near the unlocked shed full of agricultural chemicals. At least, not that time.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-77988568991715574042009-07-28T14:53:00.002+00:002009-07-28T14:55:46.882+00:00Apologies for lack of updatesApologies to readers of this blog for the lack of recent posts. Due to illness (my own and other members of the family) and needing time outside of work to deal with this I have not been able to write as much as I would like. However, there are more tales yet to come so keep checking as I promise there will be an update at some point.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-43451846410928927682009-03-09T10:55:00.001+00:002009-03-09T10:57:06.076+00:00A sense of chemistry<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmd4oA82Mo15r85W0uUK8ahi-UYPUSFQXMclKqWd2C3A02L68A8jFdOys3YyDEePJiq1GXGFbqn86A0dkk3OyBWQSdErLqHo5-H_85EjcZn5ZK7tjy6wz8Njxy8N0CJMBWlQKshUc0zJE/s1600-h/chemicals.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5311140237435496914" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 100px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 61px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmd4oA82Mo15r85W0uUK8ahi-UYPUSFQXMclKqWd2C3A02L68A8jFdOys3YyDEePJiq1GXGFbqn86A0dkk3OyBWQSdErLqHo5-H_85EjcZn5ZK7tjy6wz8Njxy8N0CJMBWlQKshUc0zJE/s320/chemicals.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>It may have been years of sniffing fumes that the not quite as efficient as they could be fume cupboards at our school had allowed to escape. It could just have been a natural propensity towards insanity but most of our chemistry masters showed a shocking tendency to lean in the direction of the more mentalist end of the spectrum.<br /><br />Mr Roberts was incredibly trusting to the point of naivety and would leave entire classes to their own devices for periods at a time, returning only at the sound of fire alarms or clouds of poisonous gases rolling down the corridor. Mr Peters bordered on the psychotic and his accuracy with a board rubber was legendary as many of us discovered with a chalky smack to the back of the head and Mr Burton was well, in a league of his own. Mr Burton was definitely not all there but Mr Burton liked practical demonstrations. He liked them a lot and did not take much note of health and safety, not that there was much of that back in 1983 and providing he did not burn the school down or lose too many pupils his little ‘accidents’ were on the whole overlooked.<br /><br />His favourite demonstration was of distillation. He would mix up some copper sulphate, a pleasantly poisonous substance, in water, attach it to a set of distillation apparatus, distil the water off and drink it to show that pure water was produced from the toxic solution. He would do this every year without fail as the fourth lesson for the first years in the lab next door to the sixth form library.<br /><br />Now, as it happened a number of us sixth formers were in the sixth form library that fateful afternoon. We were supposed to be studying. In fact most us were lounging around in a state of fitful torpor following a lunchtime not at all underage drinking session at the local pub whose landlord had appalling eyesight and who apparently could not tell a sixteen year old from a sixty year old. The lab and the library had a connecting door and it was Pete, spying through the keyhole that realised that Mr Burton was going to carry out his famous demonstration. It was also Pete who suggested pulling a practical joke and it was Pete who had the means to do so in his pocket.<br /><br />Pete was our resident delinquent and punk rocker. He spent most of his out of school hours hanging around the local park with the older punks drinking whatever concoctions they had managed to steal from the local supermarket or in the case of Pete, his dads cocktail bar. Nowadays hanging around in parks drinking cider is the preserve of the local chavs, back then it was the preserve of middle class schoolboys with safety pins in their blazer as a sign of rebellion. As a result of this Pete habitually carried a half bottle of vodka around with him in his rucksack, something that would lead to him being carried out of the boys toilets one lunchtime during the A-Level exams, half conscious and mumbling something about how he fancied Mrs O’Hara, the head of biology and a lady who made Mrs Thatcher look sweet and cuddly.<br /><br />Anyhow, a plan was swiftly hatched and put into action. Andy was sent to knock on the door of the lab and when Mr Burton answered, informed him that the headmaster wished to see him rather urgently. As Mr Burton left Pete was through the connecting door like a shot and began phase two of the plan. The distilled water in a lab beaker at the end of the apparatus was quickly poured down the sink and replaced with a generous helping of vodka whilst the rest of us threatened the class of new first years with the direst of punishments if they breathed a word when Mr Burton returned. The whole operation took less than two minutes and we were all back in the library before Mr Burton wandered back looking slightly more confused than he normally did.<br /><br />Unaware that he had an extra audience peering through the keyhole and any chinks in the painted glass of the door he launched into his spiel, something about the “Distillate being pure water and perfectly safe to drink as the toxic impurities had been left at the other end of the apparatus”. With this he raised the beaker and took a huge swig…coughed…gagged…gasped…swore…gasped a bit more and staggered towards the door. We all looked at each other as the sounds of him lurching across the corridor were followed by the sounds of someone being violently ill in the staff toilets.<br /><br />A couple of days later in the morning assembly the headmaster reported that Mr Burton was expected to make a full recovery after a lab experiment had gone tragically wrong although he may not return for a while due to the accident exacerbating a few other problems in Mr Burtons private life.<br /><br />It wasn’t until weeks later we discovered that he was a recovering alcoholic taking some seriously unpleasant drugs that would make him throw up if he so much as looked at a bottle of booze or walked within fifty yards of a pub. We just thought that the far away look was part and parcel of being a chemistry teacher inhaling all those noxious fumes, not that he was a bit partial to a bottle or two of Scotch of an evening to help him forget his days teaching horrible little bastards like us. Perhaps fortunately for us he eventually made a complete recovery but according to younger siblings who attended the school after we left he never performed the copper sulphate trick ever again without taking a good long sniff of what had emerged from the apparatus even if he had been standing watching the process from beginning to end.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-74007049350382732552008-10-02T13:44:00.002+00:002008-10-02T13:45:44.872+00:00Flour Power<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBuqNlUx9cTinmKu9vmTny3aiaQZVpObQC0Wmzp4Qoogil56HcGD1EagZ4QXRRq0hzvrNFpGmBOFG1km75otlKfkHW1-vHKbzNYHCBK7P3XnB3GmCMHz2JUzrI_mSaUkGbIbCljzhwFtw/s1600-h/flour_bowl.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5252552151278560674" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBuqNlUx9cTinmKu9vmTny3aiaQZVpObQC0Wmzp4Qoogil56HcGD1EagZ4QXRRq0hzvrNFpGmBOFG1km75otlKfkHW1-vHKbzNYHCBK7P3XnB3GmCMHz2JUzrI_mSaUkGbIbCljzhwFtw/s320/flour_bowl.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>‘Home Economics’, two words that struck dread into the hearts of most of the first year boys at my school. Apart from one or two who preferred needlework and making light fluffy sponges and well, they were considered a bit on the strange side anyhow. The rest of us would have much rather been in metal work making the kind of sharp, pointy implement that would give Rambo wet dreams.<br /><br />It wasn’t that we hated the lesson as such, at the end of it you got to sample the things everyone else had made and on the whole the recorded fatalities from Salmonella and Botulism were in the low double digits. No, it was simply that the double period on a Tuesday morning was stiflingly boring, made even more so by Mrs Cash, our Home Economics tutor being the most safety conscious person in the whole world and not letting us anywhere near anything vaguely sharp as well as insisting we wore the kind of outfits more at home in the chemistry labs where at least there were substances that could bring about horrible and agonising death. In Home Economics the worst that could happen would be a fellow pupil running amok with a potato masher.<br /><br />Suffice it to say we tried desperately to banish the boredom but all our attempts seemed doomed to failure. The tabletop finger soccer match using dried peas came to an abrupt halt when an over enthusiastic corner kick ricocheted off the blackboard and into the batter mix Mrs Cash was showing us how to make resulting in a ban on dried peas. The Spaghetti catapult incident led to just about everything being banned apart from flour and what harm could flour do?<br /><br />As it happens, quite a lot in the wrong hands! In the hands of a baker it can be made into succulent, crisp crusted loaves or indulgent cakes. In the hands of a bunch of schoolboys it becomes a near lethal weapon.<br /><br />It was a dreary November day and we were supposed to be making rock cakes when Mrs Cash was called away to attend an incident in the gym in her other role as stand in school nurse when the real one was incapacitated due to her medicinal brandy habit or on ‘holiday’ due to the same. Now was the time for mischief but what could we do? We had no sharp implements so murder and torture were out of the question. All we had was flour, water, margarine and currants and barring covering the class swot in ‘Stork’ there wasn’t much else we could do. It was Gavin who suggested the ‘pillar of flame’, as he had seen it done by some lads in the council flats where his aunt lived. All we needed was a stairwell, a bag of flour and matches and we had all three. As a precaution, just in case someone got a bit too enthusiastic with the flambé the classroom had a fire exit that led to a concrete stairwell, we had bags of flour and given the smoking habits of half the boys in the school there was no shortage of matches and lighters either.<br /><br />The method of making the ‘pillar of flame’ was easy, someone, in our case Gavin, stood at the top of the stairs and shook flour down through the stairwell, someone at the bottom, Andy, threw a match into the descending flour and the result was a pleasing pillar of flame. All very spectacular the first two times we did it but we had failed to notice that not all the flour burnt and the air was getting thick with dust. On the third attempt Gavin, perhaps trying to impress may have shaken a bit too much as when the match was hurled the result was not so much ‘pillar of flame’, more ‘wrath of God’. In fact it may be that the whole ten commandments and burning bush thing was less a religious experience than a couple of Israelites arsing about with wheat based products when Moses arrived on Mount Sinai.<br /><br />Fortunately most of us were shielded by the stairs and only received a superficial scorching but Gavin who had been leaning over the edge of the top banister took the full force of the flaming column that ignited with an audible ‘WHOMPH’ that rattled the door at the base of the stairs. This was followed by noises that could only be described as a strangled “Argh!” and a slightly louder “SHIIIITE!” We raced to the top of the stairs to find Gavin standing in a state of total shock, his face red, missing his eyebrows and with wisps of smoke rising from his hair. Below us Andy was frantically stamping on his white coat that had gone a distinctly sooty colour. Quickly we bundled Gavin back into the classroom and stuck his head under the tap at one of the sinks…just as Mrs Cash arrived back from whatever emergency had occurred in the gym to find us apparently trying to drown one of our number whilst another stood gazing forlornly at a coat that appeared to have been put in the oven at gas mark four.<br /><br />As she stood staring in disbelief at the now soaking and eyebrow-less Gavin it was possible to see her struggling with how to phrase “What the fucking hell is going on here you little bastards?” in terms that could be delivered to a bunch of 11 and 12 year old children. It was left to Martin, always one to come up with a good answer to say<br /><br />“It was the oven Miss, the gas must have been on and when he tried to light it there was an explosion. You really ought to get the caretaker to check it out, we might have been killed.”<br /><br />That it was only the boys that had apparently come to close to death was probably what led to her being less convinced of this than she was that we had been mucking around with the ovens. As a result we got to spend the rest of the lesson copying out recipe books whilst frantically praying that she would have no need to go to the fire exit stairwell which was covered in flour and scorch marks and that we could blame the devastation on the 3rd form who had the lesson after ours. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-1801762758905473842008-09-19T15:35:00.003+00:002008-09-19T15:37:43.100+00:00Atomic Fireball II<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiohn7dA6w8uO8iwtA8_JQqRNQHEuDRRl1_tEIuUrxM7yI2dnGiTglb8Ne_eAsQXNjtg_pvPEEntiPPH5T9DI4TRuXCmphnV7Us2pXzNh130LrcBdX5VrE37pxsMUZebMNcVyELr4CNtoU/s1600-h/bomb.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247756685896636146" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiohn7dA6w8uO8iwtA8_JQqRNQHEuDRRl1_tEIuUrxM7yI2dnGiTglb8Ne_eAsQXNjtg_pvPEEntiPPH5T9DI4TRuXCmphnV7Us2pXzNh130LrcBdX5VrE37pxsMUZebMNcVyELr4CNtoU/s320/bomb.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>You might have thought we had learnt our lesson. Messing around with things that go bang is not a good idea especially when it earns you a walloping from your friends grandfather for half destroying his greenhouse and most of his prize winning vegetables. However, the lesson had obviously not sunk in as a year after doing just that Stuart, Sanjeev and myself were once again dabbling in the dark arts of making things go ‘BOOM!’<br /><br />My parents and I had moved earlier in the year and were living on the upper floors of my grandparents large Georgian House whilst our new house was being extensively redecorated to remove the kind of wallpaper that even by the middle of the 70s was considered hideous and brown, the like of which can only be seen nowadays in re-runs of ‘The Sweeney’ or ‘Life on Mars’, that the previous owners had so loved. This in turn meant that I was living close to Sanjeev and Stuart, my friends who lived close to my grandparents.<br /><br />For some reason that summer the craze amongst the local boys was not bubblegum card collecting or something equally safe and not likely to end up in hideous death. It was making bangers from the metal tubes inside pens or small pieces of copper pipe. Naturally being the good, well-behaved lads we were we stayed away from such pursuits and played chess or read encyclopaedias in our spare time. Sorry, that would be a bare-faced lie. We blew stuff up by filling the tubes with scraped matches, crimping the ends and throwing them onto small fires we had built round the back of the derelict church hall just like everybody else.<br /><br />They made quite impressive bangs and on the whole there were surprisingly few fatalities but then things started to get a bit competitive between us and a couple of the other gangs of neighbourhood kids who also hung round the back of the hall to blow stuff up. In fact it was not so much competitive as an arms race in miniature and we were determined to go nuclear first.<br /><br />Now getting hold of the Plutonium and other stuff that goes into an atomic bomb was a bit beyond us as ten year olds even if Sanjeevs' dad did work at the local university so we improvised. As it would happen plumbers working on some new houses nearby had left several six inch lengths of one inch copper pipe lying around and these were duly purloined and after using my granddads tools to bend and seal one end, filled with a mixture of gunpowder from the bangers Stuart always seemed to have, all our available supplies of plastic caps, a Vesuvius fountain Sanjeev had saved from the previous years Guy Fawkes party and about three large boxes worth of scraped match heads. In fact, come that Autumn my mother could be constantly heard complaining that all the matches to light the fire seemed to have disappeared from the kitchen cupboard. I of course denied all knowledge. We soon had two ‘bangers’ that were in hindsight, not so much bangers as improvised weapons of mass destruction that nowadays would have the US marines storming our houses under cover of mass airstrikes and an artillery barrage to make sure they did not fall into the wrong hands.<br /><br />Now, not wanting to seem like right lemons in front of the other kids if our handiwork failed to go boom in a satisfying way we decided that one of them should be sacrificed in a test run much like the Manhattan Project had tested the first atom bomb in the desert. We unfortunately did not have a desert or a test rig. What we did have was the back of Sanjeevs granddads shed and a largish plant pot. Looking back, spending our pocket money on a flight to the Mojave might have been a good idea. We filled the pot with paper, wood and anything else vaguely flammable and added a dash of methylated spirits just to make sure, rested the ‘banger’ with the least amount of our explosive mixture in it across the pot, flung in one of the few matches we had not turned into headless sticks and ran for cover.<br /><br />We waited and waited a bit longer, none of us were about to go back and then suddenly:<br /><br />BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!<br /><br />The detonation was far louder than any of us had expected and a not insubstantial mushroom cloud of smoke rose behind the shed. “Yes, it had worked, we could go down to the church hall and show the other kids…hang on, why was there still smoke pouring from behind the shed ?”<br /><br />Did I forget to mention that this was 1976? The summer had been hot and dry, roads had melted, people were frying eggs on the bonnet of their Ford Capri and the vegetation behind the shed was tinder dry. The explosion had shattered the plant pot and scattered flaming debris amongst the weeds and now flames were licking up the side of the shed. In a moment of the kind of blind panic that only ten year old boys who have just committed an act of inadvertent arson can have we ran back into the house desperately searching for something to put the flames out, totally ignoring the fact that right next to the shed was the garden hose. Anyhow, we had all heeded the dire warnings about not wasting water under pain of horrible death and a stern telling off from the government minister for drought.<br /><br />In full fire fighting mode we pelted back out clutching a soda siphon and a number of bottles of Panda Pop lemonade that anyone who grew up in the 70s will tell you, were pretty useless at quenching thirst let alone fighting fires due to their rather small size. Desperately we squirted and poured only to be surrounded by clouds of steam smelling vaguely of burnt sugar but the blaze continued. It was perhaps lucky that Sanjeevs dad chose that moment to come home and that he had the presence of mind to totally ignore the dire water wasting warnings and get stuck in with the garden hose whilst we stood guiltily back and tried to pretend that we were not really there.<br /><br />Five minutes later the fire was well and truly out although the end of the shed looked worse for wear and a swathe of the garden was well and truly crisped. Sanjeevs dad, who was one of the politest and well spoken people I had ever encountered stood looking at us as if unable to say what he was really thinking until finally he managed to slowly and with precise pronunciation say<br /><br />“What is the meaning of this……..bloody outrage?”<br /><br />It was no use denying it, we were caught red handed, bang to rights and could not even claim it was caused by plummeting space junk as Stuart had a box of matches, albeit mainly headless, in his pocket. The remainder of that summer holiday was spent reading encyclopaedias and playing chess as we were not allowed outside without parental supervision. Oddly enough though, whilst lying in bed one night the air was rent by an almighty bang from a nearby street. Either our remaining ‘banger’ had found its way into enemy hands or one of the other gangs of kids had managed to up the ante a bit. Whatever it was, ten minutes later I heard sirens and could swear I could smell slightly burnt sugar.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-20306851447096840692008-04-17T10:34:00.002+00:002008-04-17T10:38:58.541+00:00Bow Woe<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIpBrurJQ557heU4rq3uyApw2952CYcyoDcXlV9uC4bqMH0Wy6D3m2Ck0rgnaZLRSZ8cX6TcPiHmSuLKCHAEpVttPpCq2ENDuVobhCiNz-AcOjaRsFXZwCPm8ERJf_8NAeqD-xeS71Jx0/s1600-h/target_archery.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5190160973640138578" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIpBrurJQ557heU4rq3uyApw2952CYcyoDcXlV9uC4bqMH0Wy6D3m2Ck0rgnaZLRSZ8cX6TcPiHmSuLKCHAEpVttPpCq2ENDuVobhCiNz-AcOjaRsFXZwCPm8ERJf_8NAeqD-xeS71Jx0/s320/target_archery.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>As a child living in the 70s I had rather a lot of weapons. In the days before political correctness if you were a boy you were pretty much likely to have a toy cupboard filled with Action Men, Airfix soldiers, toy cars and an assortment of weapons. I probably had more than my fair share. In fact I could have probably armed a small country had the toy guns I owned been real. Just about every scenario in the games we played was covered. Cowboys: set of cap firing six shooters and a Winchester. Knights: Three swords and a very useful battle axe that came pretty tight if you swung it just right. Foreign Legion: Replica Enfield .303. Soldiers: Couple of Thompsons, a Colt .45 Automatic, an MP40 and if there was a shortage of evil Nazi officers I could even provide a Luger and march around saying “Zo Englander pigdog, you sought you could ezcape! Vell zink again!”, just like they did in the comics. Even if we were playing James Bond I had a Walther PPK as well.<br /><br />Many of the weapons could as my mother was fond of saying “put someone’s eye out!” Some fired ping pong balls, others plastic pellets and one of the Thompsons and an Airfix FN SLR even fired pretty chunky replica bullets…or bits of sawn down pencil if you really wanted to bring realistic pain and suffering to the games of war.<br /><br />However, the sight of a gang of lads and in some cases girls as well, charging round the streets, fields or through gardens caused no reaction whatsoever. We could run about playing soldiers, toting in some cases quite realistic weaponry without an eyebrow being raised or a couple of vanloads of firearms officers arriving to arrest us, fingerprint us and deport us to Guantanamo Bay. A ten year old with a ‘Tommy gun’ was a fairly common sight and certainly did not mean that a drive by shooting was about to go down or a drug deal done behind the allotment sheds. In fact the only interaction with the police was if the local bobby happened to be passing and asked us to keep the noise down a bit if we got a little too boisterous in our machine gun and grenade imitations or as happened on one occasion he saw my replica FN and commented that he had used one just like it when he was in the army.<br /><br />The one thing I did not have was a bow and arrow. At least not until my grandmother decided to bring one back from a holiday jaunt during the summer of 1973 to complement the ‘Red Indian’ outfit with it’s tomahawk and rubber scalping knife she had bought the previous Christmas. Naturally the first thing my mother said on seeing it and it’s sucker tipped arrows was “Be careful, you could have someone’s eye out with that!”<br /><br />So, the first thing I did was head out into the garden and find my friend Ross who was playing out in his garden that backed onto ours. Now, in our garden there grew a plant that when it died back left tough, woody stalks. These stalks made perfect arrows and it was not long before they were utilised as such, being fired around with not much care as to what they hit. It was not long either before mum, seeing that we were stalking each other through the shrubbery with arrows now tipped with sharp bits of slate from an old tile, came rushing out and confiscated our lethal weapons. However, on seeing our glum faces she relented and said we could have the bow back as long as we used it properly and in a safe manner. Properly and safe meant indoors with the plastic sheet target it had come with stuck to the back of the kitchen door.<br /><br />The bow was quite powerful, probably in order to make the sucker tipped arrows stick to the target and we soon found that if you pulled it to full stretch a really satisfying, door rattling thud was the result and it was all quite safe. Or would have been if dad had not been in the habit of using the gate at the end of the garden to come via when he returned from work instead of having to walk an extra hundred or so yards around the end of the houses up to the main road and use the front door.<br /><br />I had just stretched the bow to it’s fullest extent and let fly with the arrow from a kneeling position like I had seen in a recent swashbuckling Robin Hood film shown one Sunday afternoon when the kitchen door swung open and dad, half reading the evening paper wandered into sight only to take an incredibly well aimed arrow travelling at some speed in the groin. Any pain might have ended there had our cat, Sally not also wandered in to the kitchen at that point only to have dad stagger backwards and stand on her tail as she stopped to stuff her face with cat food on the way to her favourite spot on the back of the sofa.<br /><br />Sally was quite a calm, placid cat but being trodden on unleashed the psycho-kitty within and from outside the door we watched as she raced around the kitchen in a clawing, biting, spitting fury as dad clutched his groin with one hand and tried to fend the demon possessed feline off with the other. It was a little like watching a live action version of Tom and Jerry as Sally hurtled around knocking cooking implements, spice jars, crockery and condiments flying as dad tried to batter her away with the newspaper. It lasted perhaps ten seconds at most before she fled through the cat flap and streaked up the garden leaving dad standing in a kitchen that appeared to have been the scene of a small war.<br /><br />It was at that moment that mum chose to arrive home having gone to visit the corner shop at the end of the road only to find her kitchen a scene of total devastation, apparently caused by dad having gone utterly mental with a folded newspaper. Ross and I meanwhile decided to beat a tactical retreat and headed over to the fields where some more of our friends were playing ‘Knights of the Round Table’. A much safer game…at least until we turned up with my bow and a handful of plant stalks and suggested it became Robin Hood. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-67847517904576328042008-02-28T14:27:00.002+00:002008-02-28T14:38:57.726+00:00The perils of portaloos<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1e1ESEfYcAeFqYINB6bvOjhyDAr-cO_GIpYB8rOVrFeekkrEM_6B4JXx8TcKTrb-0fOVHl2rwppeHHA3pOIM6u60IrbZ484zNjERpev8FLTAkfx5H5NeqdNqPGqunETf0xGiJ7OmZpzs/s1600-h/portaloo.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5172037900924705138" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1e1ESEfYcAeFqYINB6bvOjhyDAr-cO_GIpYB8rOVrFeekkrEM_6B4JXx8TcKTrb-0fOVHl2rwppeHHA3pOIM6u60IrbZ484zNjERpev8FLTAkfx5H5NeqdNqPGqunETf0xGiJ7OmZpzs/s320/portaloo.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>It was a moment of teenage rebellion that caused me to become an archaeologist. Dad had wanted me to join his old RAF squadron so that I could travel overseas and, as the old slogan went, “meet new and exotic people, then drop bombs on them” but I had other ideas. Despite my military obsessed childhood I was not quite ready to hurtle round the skies like Tom Cruise with a bloody silly nickname like ‘Mongoose’ or ‘Chinchilla’. It was possibly down to a bit of an incident with a training aircraft in my cadet days and the probability that the RAF would not let me anywhere near anything expensive ever again that did it. Thus it was to my dads eternal disgust that I became an archaeologist or as he put it “a bloody gypsy”.<br /><br />Now those of you that have watched ‘Time Team’ will know all about archaeology or at least the sanitised version of it. Archaeology is all about digging holes in the most disgusting conditions known to man. Invariably it is cold and wet, warm and wet or if you are really lucky the hottest summer in living memory where you can fry eggs on the environmental team and people are dying of sunstroke just by thinking of being outdoors. The ground is either so hard you need a drill to get through it, or as one former colleague had experienced, dynamite or is so wet entire surveying teams have vanished into the quagmire never to be seen again. No excavation can call itself a success unless at least three of the excavators have been lost to drowning or heat stroke. Most digs were out in the arse end of nowhere although there was usually a pub nearby, odd that, and free time was either spent in tents that were trying to launch themselves skyward in a force 8 gale or getting steadily rat-arsed in the pub on the pokiest real ale you could find. If you were lucky the group you were working for had a ‘diggers hostel’, which is a bit like a student hall but with a constant aroma of week old cabbage, last nights curry, stale farts and damp dungeons and dragons player. Far too many archaeologists either played D&D or were involved in live action role playing or historical battle re-enactment societies so there was also a high risk of death by tripping over someone’s battle axe or flintlock when heading to the toilet to get rid of the copious amounts of real ale everyone consumed to help aid in forgetting the positively grim conditions we lived in. Then there were the Portaloos…<br /><br />Even out in the middle of nowhere we had to have a Portaloo, probably to stop bearded, real ale drinking wannabe orc slayers peeing in the bushes or vanishing into copses with a wad of leaves and scaring the local wildlife. However, without fail the Portaloos were absolutely foul. Those of you reading this that have ever been to a festival should imagine the worst toilets there, multiply it by ten then plonk the whole lot in the middle of the Somme circa 1916 on a wet Sunday and you probably wouldn’t be close even then. They went far beyond the word ‘minging’ and well into the territory of banned by several biological warfare treaties. That however did not stop Rick our finds supervisor from disappearing into one for several hours at a time with a copy of the Guardian that cunningly concealed a gentlemen’s periodical of the kind where young ladies were displayed artistically and requests were made of gentlemen readers to provide photographic illustrations of their nearest and dearest. Okay, why beat about the bush, it was a copy of ‘Razzle’ or some similar top shelf fare and Rick would vanish for several hours to read the paper and have what was known as a “leisurely J. Arthur” over Deirdre (44-28-32) from Bolton.<br /><br />We had been excavating one particular site for several weeks. It lay at the top of a hill and as we expanded ever outward in our search for bits of grubby pottery and stains on the ground that might indicate an iron age settlement the Portaloos were steadily pushed back towards the edge of the site until they were precariously close to the steep side of the hill. That however, did not bother us, they were perfectly safe, after all, our resident ‘engineer’ John had shored them up with some old railway sleepers from a nearby farm and a bit of drystone walling. As long as you did not practice tap dancing in one then you were perfectly safe and to be honest there were not a lot of tap dancers on site and nor could you swing a broadsword in one either. Thus, most of us were pretty safe.<br /><br />Perhaps the couple of days of almost continuous rain played its part but that will never be known, what is known is that Rick would probably not have visited the Portaloos, Guardian tucked under his arm had he known what was about to happen.<br /><br />It was a site joke that if you saw a gently swaying Portaloo you knew that Rick was in residence and this morning was no different. About half an hour after he had vanished, just enough time to scan through the paper the toilet began to shake ever so slightly, then over the course of the next half hour it began to wobble a bit more and a bit more as the delights of Deirdre and her fellow readers wives had an effect. Suddenly the stones and railway sleepers began to shift. A few of us spotted it and were dashing to warn Rick when the Portaloo slowly toppled backwards as the ‘engineering’ supporting it gave way. From within came a strangled howl as the whole lot vanished from view over the edge of the hill. As we reached the edge of the hill we were rewarded with the sight of the runaway toilet crashing into a bramble patch and coming to rest against the fence that ran along the base of the hill. About five seconds after it did, the door flew open and with a blood curdling “AAARRGGH!” Rick popped up like a demented Jack in the box, or would have if Jack in the boxes popped up with their jeans and underpants round their ankles, a rapidly fading erection and were covered in the assorted waste products donated by forty or so real ale swilling, bearded, battle re-enacting archaeologists who had not crapped in a hedgerow for weeks.<br /><br />Naturally, being the kind concerned lot we were we did not stand at the top of the hill almost bent double with laughter at the sight of Rick, covered in shit, ‘Mr Floppy’ out for all to see standing in a crashed Portaloo in the middle of a bramble patch with a look of mortal terror on his face and clutching a soggy, toilet roll festooned copy of ‘Fiesta’. Of course we did not, we were far too mature to do such a thing. Well, maybe we laughed just a bit and one of our number having an asthma attack because she was laughing so much was nothing to do with it. Honestly!<br /><br />Funnily enough after that the Portaloos were kept well away from the edge of the site and Rick, well, let’s just say he did not spend half as much time in them, perhaps just enough time to read the paper without the distractions of the ample charms of Deirdre causing him any further woe.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-3744738184628703642008-02-15T15:41:00.004+00:002008-02-15T15:46:43.178+00:00Matchbox mayhem<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdRiKRH1YyzhPqx2fq2xb1KisuAo90oqphumkPfZRw3SHd6Pdc6UqNurebleO1u-apRcDT0xiyLxfEyQ-xRNGY-p9G_09Xoa_Yovo9euJ9gMNWeisT_2RIOMXYSbFcn-GLu33wJ2jMjuE/s1600-h/diecast.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5167233404478511458" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdRiKRH1YyzhPqx2fq2xb1KisuAo90oqphumkPfZRw3SHd6Pdc6UqNurebleO1u-apRcDT0xiyLxfEyQ-xRNGY-p9G_09Xoa_Yovo9euJ9gMNWeisT_2RIOMXYSbFcn-GLu33wJ2jMjuE/s320/diecast.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbooRrFkeC9CMSYEgx0ETJGp_KoesV-CRahjBsgli9IX5_8JRqcR_Jk6tZ02yY4zfVIrd7vS9wShDkdsEvUhJJTwcpkv64v8ob0fc2D8ht2bbPOX36LRvJYNhVtZATmRIlkP_4Noz0OkE/s1600-h/diecast.jpg"></a>Another Christmas has long gone, the last morsel of Turkey eaten and the kids have already grown bored with their Wiis, DSes and overpriced movie tie in tat. It wasn’t always like that was it? Well, yes it was but back then in those less safety conscious halcyon days of the 70s we found other uses for our Christmas presents that extended their life in interesting ways.<br /><br />Apart from having far too many military based toys I also owned a huge collection of toy cars. Mainly they were from Matchbox but there were a fair few Corgi, Dinky and lesser brands in there as well. Apart from RTAs on my town builder play mat or in 1975 re-enacting Death Race 2000 with the Airfix OO scale civilians that were supposed to go with my train set there was not a lot else I could do with them other than leaving them on the stairs in the hope a parent or relation might take a Tom and Jerry inspired tumble. That was until my father bought a set that involved yellow tracks and a battery powered motor in what looked like a cash register with gears that propelled the cars around the track. Unless you had two of these you were doomed to watching the cars zip around the track until the batteries ran out or you got bored and went to overdose on Corona Limeade for a sugar rush.<br /><br />It was boring until Christmas 1974 when my mate Ross and I both got the same present, a car launcher for Matchbox cars. Basically a blue plastic box containing an industrial strength rubber band attached to a cocking lever that you attached to your track, pulled the lever back bunged a car in and pressed a button on the top of thus launching the car at high speed down the track. It was great! Cars hurtled out at phenomenal speeds. In fact I’m not sure that some did not hit the magical speed of eighty-eight miles an hour and blink out of existence in a flash of light and a flaming trail only to re-appear in 1955. It was also a lethal weapon in the hands of an eight year old boy.<br /><br />Bored with launching cars we decided to try launching other things. Things like stones from the drive, things that as our parents would put it, “Could have someone’s eye out with that!” Both our mothers were out, trusting us in those pre-pervert on every corner and underage criminality days to behave ourselves for an hour whilst they did the weekly shop on the high street.<br /><br />The stones were particularly successful and for an hour or two we ranged around the big back garden wielding what were effectively miniature ballistas, blasting chunks out of trees and the compost heap with Ross’s dads drive. Then, bored with destroying flora and fauna we wondered what else we could try and hit upon the idea of using them for their original purpose, launching cars but not down tracks. No, in the absence of either of us owning an Evel Knievel set or even a Ricochet Racer we would use them to re-create daredevil stunts by launching toy cars over the garden pond. There wasn’t much chance of us losing the cars as a) the pond wasn’t very deep and b) Ross’s dad had covered it with chicken wire after an incident involving a local Heron and two hundred or so missing goldfish so if the cars fell short they would hardly get damp in the half inch of water above the net.<br /><br />Propping the launcher on a convenient stone looted from the rockery we took our first shot and Ross’s ‘Tanzara’ flew clear over the pond and into the shrubs beyond. Cool! My ‘Blue Lightning’ followed and then we had a brief falling out in our friendship. I wanted to fire my ‘Wildcat Dragster’ next but Ross wanted another shot with his ‘Tanzara’ as it looked most like an Evel Knievel car. This resulted in a bit of push and shove, not a good idea with a loaded weapon, sorry, toy car launcher when you are standing outside the patio doors that lead to the dining room. About five seconds into our argument there was a noise that sort of went…<br /><br />THWWWWOCK – CRASH – TINKLE - SMASH<br /><br />If, at that moment the word ‘Arsebiscuits’ had been invented we would have said it. The launcher had fired, the car had gone through one of the panes of glass in the door and what was worse had also taken out half of a set of sherry glasses that were about six billion years old and had been passed down through the family through generations. We were, once again deep in the proverbial doo-doo. Unless we could make it look like we had nothing to do with it. It was then that eight year old cunning kicked in. Everybody had a coal fire what with global warming having not yet been invented, the ashes went into the bin along with lumps of what my father always called ‘clinker’, bits of coal and stone that had fused together in the heat of the fire. Selecting a roughly table tennis ball sized piece we hurried indoors, located the car and left the ‘clinker’ in its place. With this we fled the scene of the crime and headed for the local park on our bikes.<br /><br />We returned an hour or two later to find Ross’s mum in the dining room clearing up the glass and asked where we had been replied semi-truthfully “At the park.”<br /><br />“So you don’t know anything about this then?” she asked brandishing the piece of ‘clinker’. For a moment our lives hung in the balance, would one of us crack in a moment of George Washington style “I cannot tell a lie”? It was Ross who spoke first:<br /><br />“Cor! Is that a piece of meteorite? It must have come from space and smashed through the window. Lucky we were not playing in the garden it might have hit us!”<br /><br />I’m not entirely sure if his mum believed us but without the proof we were innocent until proven guilty and Ross kept up the pretence by asking if he could keep the bit of meteorite so he could take it in to school the next day only to quietly dispose of the evidence just in case his mum had managed to invent DNA evidence twenty odd years ahead of time. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-78900402470827063372008-02-08T14:13:00.000+00:002008-02-08T14:17:05.843+00:00Apologies for the delayJust a quick post to say apologies for not posting any tales for a while. Unfortunately due to work commitments and trying to strike a work/life balance that isn't 85% work I have not had a lot of time to update on here. However, when I get time I am continuing to write so expect a new batch of tales sometime in the future including the dangers of Portaloos and why kids and toy cars really should not mix.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-9601747395346231732007-12-06T13:50:00.001+00:002007-12-06T13:51:50.498+00:00Atomic Fireball<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyoUBOOJVzCju6cUVCEMoIvnbS_0Y8YasyRm8la9FIvpS2a16_HmdtzHpGOeVBAhJjF44D_lGcWgjvugXRSeyoNEmOlXaG6KN10Lv3I1P0XvhgAXhw0ND_BTh4lAMo-52dMojwde-F0c0/s1600-h/explosion3.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5140857162698060162" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyoUBOOJVzCju6cUVCEMoIvnbS_0Y8YasyRm8la9FIvpS2a16_HmdtzHpGOeVBAhJjF44D_lGcWgjvugXRSeyoNEmOlXaG6KN10Lv3I1P0XvhgAXhw0ND_BTh4lAMo-52dMojwde-F0c0/s320/explosion3.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><span style="font-size:100%;">Back in the days before games consoles and PCs the closest you got to the Burnout or Need For Speed series involved Dinky or Matchbox cars and a lot of imagination. If you were really, really lucky your dad might have convinced your mum that a Scalextric or TCR set was what you wanted for Christmas so he could play too. An FPS usually involved running round a local bombsite, scrubland, park or the local churchyard firing at your mates with an assortment of cap guns and as for huge explosions, you only got those in war films…unless you were a ten year old with an unhealthy obsession in militaria and making things go ‘BOOM’. As mentioned before on here, my friend Dave and I both had that particular unhealthy obsession. I’m not sure what his excuse was but I still blame my granddad.<br /><br />One bonfire night in the mid 70s Dave’s wheeler-dealer of a dad got hold of a quantity of Chinese fireworks from one of his contacts. In those days Chinese fireworks were a bit of a novelty sold in a rare few shops. Most of us made do with boxes of Astra, Brocks or Standard, nothing as exotic as these and tame stuff unless you count the time one nearly set fire to the conservatory. Usually it was only the rich kids down the road whose parents could afford them that got them on Bonfire Night, not that we did not reap the benefits too as we could see their display by standing on the garden wall and peering over the fence.<br /><br />Unfortunately the provenance of these particular oriental fireworks could not quite be ascertained and to say that they were a little on the duff side would have been an understatement. About 70% of them failed to bang and sparkle as sensible fireworks are supposed to. These were thrown to one side and forgotten about as us kids stuffed our faces with the party food on offer.<br /><br />However, come the following day Dave and I were poking through the detritus of the previous night as bored kids are wont to do when we discovered the huge pile of dud fireworks that had been thrown aside. Back then bonfire nights were, on the whole not conducted in the pouring rain as global warming had not yet been invented so the explosive contents of the brightly coloured tubes was quite dry albeit slightly chilled. It appeared that the cause of non-detonation was quite simply rubbish blue touch paper that had failed to convey the fire to the powder. Of course, the next thought was obvious, “Why not make our own firework?”<br /><br />So we did.<br /><br />Nearby was a row of local shops, this being the days when such things existed and they had not all been turned into trendy wine bars and coffee shops. One of them was a haberdashers shop selling everything from buttons to huge rolls of material. A swift raid on the bins at the back procured us an empty cardboard tube left over from a roll of material and in the case of Dave, a pair of ripped jeans as we scrambled back over the wall. Back at his dads shed we bunged one end up with a cardboard disk and best part of a roll of masking tape, filled the tube with the gunpowder mix from all the other fireworks with no thought of what they had originally been supposed to do, rockets, fountains, Roman candles, they all went into the mix. The original fireworks were pretty chunky affairs and nowadays would probably have large warnings on them about retreating at least fifty metres if not several streets away or even the next county just to be really safe so there was a lot of gunpowder and ‘stuff’ (‘stuff’ being a technical term known only to ten year old boys and used to describe most chemical compounds and the green slime found in water butts). Once we had filled the tube up with the gunpowder mix and given it a bit of a tamp down we then trimmed the tube down, covered the other end with a circle of cardboard and a lot more masking tape and added a bit of blue touch paper adulterated with some scraped matches and a bit of leftover gunpowder.<br /><br />The ‘Atomic Fireball’ as it was grandly named was ready. Now we had to find somewhere to let it off in peace and quiet. It was decided that the churchyard was the ideal place as we could hide behind the buttresses whilst setting it up. It was a quiet area and passing cars were a rarity back in those days.<br /><br />Dave managed to steal some matches from the kitchen whilst I distracted his mum and we set off. A few minutes later we were in position and ready for go. After a bit of “You do it!”, “No! You do it!” the blue touch paper was lit and we retreated to a safe distance, about fifteen feet, expecting a few pops and a lot of sparks. We were not ready for the 10 foot high jet of flame and sparks accompanied by vast amounts of smoke that erupted from it.<br /><br />Standing amidst swirling smoke reminiscent of London pea soupers of the 1950s our trousers went a little bit brown as the flame scorched a black mark up the side of the church. It looked like Beelzebub himself had farted up the side of the building. The look that passed between us said it all, “Oh…arse!”<br /><br />If this obvious affront to God, that was bound to get us excommunicated from Sunday school should the vicar discover the culprits was not bad enough, at that moment the local policeman rounded the corner by the far end of the church. Now, this being a gentler time before international terrorism, crack cocaine and body armour we might have expected a Dixon of Dock Green style “Ello! Ello! What’s going on here then lads?” or some such gentle enquiry to ascertain the nature of our crime. Instead we got a slightly more earthy yell of<br /><br />“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”<br /><br />A yell that was a touch more ‘Sweeney’ than ‘Dixon’ and one that hinted at dire punishments to come. At this point our trousers went several shades browner than they had been before and we decided that discretion was the better part of valour. We ran, scaling the seven foot high spiked railings that surrounded the churchyard in seconds before fleeing for our lives. The rest of the day was spent hiding in an empty garage on a local estate, convinced that it was next stop Borstal and we would never be able to bend down in the showers again.<br /><br /><br /></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-40423540734897552672007-11-22T16:04:00.001+00:002007-11-22T16:08:19.089+00:00Flight of the Rupert<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFyea2zg7RwZvvFyTEgddNdvoZQKd60LL6Yo-SpnFe21kjmSuMzdKVBpW45NFkRNsQHE46wjp_NhmGPgCgnhV8DxTCBYRBJZ_8JJRMtVlJvWeKBWYrz-_DtmHEFkKzu5Vd4iJAxmMRTT8/s1600-h/skydiver.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5135696474355930962" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFyea2zg7RwZvvFyTEgddNdvoZQKd60LL6Yo-SpnFe21kjmSuMzdKVBpW45NFkRNsQHE46wjp_NhmGPgCgnhV8DxTCBYRBJZ_8JJRMtVlJvWeKBWYrz-_DtmHEFkKzu5Vd4iJAxmMRTT8/s320/skydiver.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><span style="font-size:100%;">D-Day, 6th of June 1944. In the hours preceding the seaborne landings thousands of allied paratroops dropped over Normandy to secure bridges, roads and harass the enemy. With them were dropped thousands of dummies known as ‘Ruperts’. These dummies, rigged with explosives to simulate gunfire were to confuse the enemy and make it appear that more paratroops were landing than there were.<br /><br />Sanjeev, Stuart and I knew all this because we had watched ‘The Longest Day’. Sanjeev lived a few doors down from my grandparents in a similarly large five storey Georgian house along with his parents, grandfather and several brothers and sisters. His father was a lecturer at the local university, his mother a fashion designer like my own mother and his granddad had served with colonial forces in the far east and liked telling stories of how he faced the might of the Japanese army armed only with a Lee Enfield, a bayonet and his wits. It was only natural then that when I visited my grandparents that Sanjeev was one of the other kids I spent time with along with Stuart who lived over the back wall.<br /><br />It was the tail end of the long summer holidays. In a few days I would be going home but we were hanging around bored. It was too warm to kick a ball around down on the green and there were not enough of us for a decent game of soldiers so we were wondering what to do. Somehow we started discussing the film ‘The Longest Day’ that had been shown on TV a few days earlier and in particular the explosive parachutists that had been dropped to sow confusion amongst the enemy. Wouldn’t it be great if we could make one of those? As usual at this point one or more of us should have said “Don’t be stupid!” and smacked the person suggesting it around the head until they suggested something a bit safer but being nine year old boys we all went “Yeah!”.<br /><br />Stuart had a whole tin filled with bangers brought back from a holiday in France. In the 70s if you were a kid and you went to France you brought back as many as you could possibly conceal in your parents and siblings luggage without arousing the suspicions of the Customs people. We could use those to simulate the gunfire bit but what about the dummy. None of us wanted to sacrifice our ‘Action Men’ and anyhow I had only brought three uniforms with mine, none of which were suitable for falling from the sky. It was Sanjeev who came up with the second not so bright idea of the day. His mum had an old shop dummy up in the attic she had once used to display clothes she had designed. We could use that, attach a sheet to it and drop it from the attic window that was five storeys up. Brilliant! His parents were out and only his granddad was around and he was most likely to be asleep.<br /><br />So it was that the three of us, Stuart clutching his biscuit tin full of bangers that he had nipped home to collect sneaked up into the attic. We were not really allowed to be there, his dad used to tell us off frequently but it was one of our favourite places. By climbing out of the window we could gain access to an area of flat roof between the houses from which we could snipe at passers by in the street with our spud guns and water pistols.<br /><br />The dummy Sanjeev had mentioned was easily located as was a large dust sheet covering an old trunk which on exploration contained a whole load of Sanjeevs’ granddads old belongings including of all things a tin helmet. “Cool!” we all exclaimed, we could tie it to the dummy for added realism. Whilst Sanjeev and Stuart hung several garlands of bangers around the dummy which had a few more bumps and curves than the average allied parachutist I made the parachute by tying four lengths of hairy string to the corners of the dust sheet and securing them under the dummies arms. With a flourish Stuart put the tin helmet on the dummies head and produced a box of matches from his pocket we were ready to go.<br /><br />With a bit of effort we got the dummy up onto the window ledge and pushed it out onto the ledge that ran beyond the window so that it rested precariously against the roof . Stuart lit the fuse of the bangers and we gave it a mighty heave.<br /><br />It worked quite well…for the first ten or so feet. The dust sheet billowed out arresting its fall and it began to drift earthwards…and sideways, straight towards Sanjeevs granddads greenhouse. Like my own grandfather he was a keen gardener. Every year his allotment produced a veritable bounty of vegetables and his pride and joy were his tomatoes, cucumbers and various exotic specimens with unpronounceable names that he grew in his greenhouse. Now our ‘Rupert’ was headed straight for it.<br /><br />For an agonising second or two it looked like it might miss but then the inevitable happened, one of the knots I had tied decided that now was the time to come un-knotted. It was hardly my fault I had dropped out of the Cub Scouts before we had done knotting. The dummy dropped like a stone and the hideous crash as it plummeted through the greenhouse roof was followed by the gunfire like sounds of the bangers detonating. This in turn was swiftly followed by Sanjeevs granddad bolting from the shed at the end of the garden where he had apparently been having a nap to stand in incredulous silence at the spectacle of a shop dummy wearing his old tin hat dangling by a few bits of string engaged in the nefarious activity of blowing up his prized cucumbers. The silence did not last for long as spotting us clinging to the roof, white faced at the enormity of what we had done he let fly with a thickly accented yell of<br /><br />“You…you little…buggers!”<br /><br />It was no good trying to run, by the time we had pelted downstairs he was waiting for us and in those pre-PC, pre-childrens rights days that meant that all three of us got the seats of our trousers well and truly dusted and Stuart and I were marched round to our respective parents and guardians. That night my grandfather called my parents and suggested it might be a wise move if they collected me a few days early lest Sanjeevs granddad carry through with his threat to introduce me to cold steel like he had done to a number of ‘the nipponese’ if he happened across me again. Unfortunately only being a few doors away that was more than likely. My parents heeded my grandfather’s advice and did so and I may have escaped a fate likely to end in death but for the next six months I seemed to do an awfully large number of chores for very little financial reward.<br /><br />Fortunately by the following year it had all been forgotten which was lucky given that that summer we almost burnt the shed down instead.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-78246625171719179332007-11-01T14:51:00.001+00:002007-11-01T14:55:14.780+00:00Ed<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQzDaiA3vf4On74evIEthi4zWpj8tKBZpZOUD-tHFDrxkuR24_KlIbfnsL0q9zKponEqIR9GcwScmeB9KZwGdWLbDnOWsO1H31MWZg1MrXhPjTXOj9ypyxTHIGERsrYMqkDcjpIj_E5Bo/s1600-h/gnomes.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5127884735484447506" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQzDaiA3vf4On74evIEthi4zWpj8tKBZpZOUD-tHFDrxkuR24_KlIbfnsL0q9zKponEqIR9GcwScmeB9KZwGdWLbDnOWsO1H31MWZg1MrXhPjTXOj9ypyxTHIGERsrYMqkDcjpIj_E5Bo/s320/gnomes.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>We were never quite sure where Ed came from or even when he attached himself to our group who on the whole had been friends since the first year of primary school. All we knew was that one day he was there and that put him anywhere near a pint of shandy and disaster was likely to follow. He was a nice enough chap, perhaps too nice who had obviously had a decent upbringing. His parents were both awfully middle class and he still lived with them in a large house in one of the up market areas of town.<br /><br />Unfortunately Ed liked to think that he was a hardened drinker. Maybe he was providing that whatever they served wherever he was from was weaker than the watered down witches piss they served in some of the more tourist oriented bars in town. Having grown up honing our underage drinking talents in some of the more ‘interesting’ country pubs in the area the rest of us tended to gravitate towards the kind of cider that was still illegal under several European treaties and which could perform painless surgery to the knees after a couple of pints leading to many of its devotees waking up with a mouthful of cigarette butts and sawdust from the floor.<br /><br />Ed was no exception. In fact on most occasions just walking him past the barrels of ‘Old poachers gumboot’, ‘Badgers Bollocks’ and other such quaintly named beverages would usually lead to him falling over in a stupor there and then. No matter how many times it happened he would not heed the warnings of those who had been there before him many times since the age of 14. On at least one occasion he had held a pint of cider aloft declaring “Looks like orange barley water!” before quaffing it in one go. Five minutes later he slid slowly off his seat and under the table. Of course, being the good mates that we were we allowed him to lie there for at least an hour collecting dog ends and crisp packets in his open and gently snoring mouth. Oddly enough many years later another friend used almost the same line in a different pub in a different town but the results were almost exactly the same.<br /><br />Thus, when we set off on one of our legendary pub crawls from one end of town to the other we made Ed solemnly promise to pace himself and maybe stick to lemonade in four out of every five pubs. To be fair to him he did as he was told as the rest of us downed halves in every one of the twenty or so pubs we visited and got slightly tipsy. It was only when we reached the Red Lion that Ed forgot his promise and got stuck into some of the real ales on offer. Now if the country folk at one end of town liked their cider, the trawlermen at the other end liked their real ales and some of them were even pokier than the cider but lacking the bits of dead rat to add to the taste. Ed had at least four pints. Twenty minutes later he went a bit glassy-eyed and toppled from his chair much to the amusement of the assembled throng. Not that big a deal until we realised he was staring straight up the skirt of one of the trawlermens wives or girlfriends. Not only was he pissed as a fart but he was about to get himself and probably us too beaten to a pulp by some bloke who smelt of fish. Swiftly as two alcohol befuddled teenagers could Paul and Alex scooped him up and we fled the pub.<br /><br />We had not travelled a hundred yards when Ed broke free, mumbling something about gymnastics and made a beeline for the railings that edged part of the harbour. Before any of us could scream “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” he had climbed onto them and in utter silence, vanished over the other side. We ran as fast as our own legs, numbed by alcohol, could carry us although we were sobering up rather quickly, waiting for the splash as Ed hit the murky waters…but there was no splash. As we reached the edge we discovered why. The tide was high and a new mooring pontoon had been installed. Ed was lying on his back on the pontoon, staring up at us, waving and giggling like a lunatic. Fortunately for him he had landed on a fishing net, the alcohol had relaxed him just enough and the pontoon was high enough that no damage was done. It was Paul, good, decent, Christian Paul who, mere months later went on to begin to carve out a future career in the priesthood who articulated all our thoughts at that moment…<br /><br />“YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER FUCKING BASTARD!” was yelled at the top of his voice, causing windows and doors to be thrown open and at least one woman to yell out “You mind your language you fucking twat!” Ed continued to look up at us, still waving and grinning from the fish reeking net. It took us a good ten minutes to extract him from his predicament and set off for home.<br /><br />Living closest to the harbour I was first to leave them so it was not until the next day when I met up with Paul and Alex for a greasy fry up prior to some hair of the dog that I discovered what they had done with Ed. Deciding that waking his folks who, judging by the lack of lights had already gone to bed, Paul and Alex had left Ed slumped over an ornamental lion in the garden figuring that he would soon sober up and find his own way in. It wasn’t until later that day that I found out what had happened after that when I received a phone call from Ed’s father, a rather pompous gentleman:<br /><br />“Did my son go out drinking with you last night?”<br /><br />“Errr! Yes!”<br /><br />“Did you bring him home?”<br /><br />“No.”<br /><br />“Do you know who did?”<br /><br />“Ummmm! Yes!”<br /><br />“Good! Can you tell them that next time they do, can they not leave him on one of my ornamental lions. He woke up in the middle of the night and threw up in the pond. My Koi do not like it. What’s worse though is that he decided he needed to have a number two as well. My wife just happened to look out of the window after hearing the noise outside. I don’t think she will ever be quite the same after seeing her son shitting on the garden gnomes!”<br /><br />Somehow as I desperately tried to quell the image of Ed squatting over a garden gnome I had the feeling that we might not be seeing him very much in the future. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-74246728342224389192007-10-19T12:52:00.000+00:002007-10-19T13:01:20.199+00:00Porterhouse II<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg30UqW83v8HJVyu782I3ZY0bWHUAbrweD8QiFyNLlbuBt0Kf804xFdQfbGtu2SA5A-bd3-2TWUdjrFczuT7mEQESKga17_Ptn_k6QCldjc7uppiraDr_SXVr8Oh2TvAXaOSDG1ynXMFkE/s1600-h/cond.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5123030609884787666" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg30UqW83v8HJVyu782I3ZY0bWHUAbrweD8QiFyNLlbuBt0Kf804xFdQfbGtu2SA5A-bd3-2TWUdjrFczuT7mEQESKga17_Ptn_k6QCldjc7uppiraDr_SXVr8Oh2TvAXaOSDG1ynXMFkE/s320/cond.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>I’m sure that the liberal minded do-gooder who decided that it would be wise to educate us in the mysteries of human sexuality regretted it afterwards. If they did not they really should have given the mayhem their afternoon lecture caused the following day.<br /><br />It wasn’t so much that the lecture, delivered to half of the sixth form, namely thirty or so seventeen year old boys, most of who were already engaging or at least trying to, in carnal ramblings with the other half of the sixth form that consisted of thirty or so seventeen year old girls that caused the mayhem. It was the packets of condoms that were handed out to us to promote safe sex and responsibility. No doubt the person who donated them presumed they would mummify in our wallets as most condoms handed out to teenage boys had tended to do in previous more sexually unenlightened times. How wrong they were!<br /><br />So, there we were, thirty or so seventeen year olds, most of whom already had wallets stuffed to bursting with prophylactics stolen from older siblings bedside cabinets, from the local barbers having endured the gazes and knowing nods of the older gents when Mr Ginelli asked “Something for the weekend sir?” and in the case of Pete whose parents ran the local chemist, from the stockroom out at the back and all of a sudden we each had an extra packet of three. If we tried to cram any more in our wallets there was a serious risk of condom overload and resulting eruption that would cover the school playground from end to end with things that were ribbed, bobbled, nubbled and tentacled for his and her pleasure. So what could we do with them?<br /><br />The answer was simple, why not inflate them and fill the sixth form year masters broom cupboard-like office with them. Brilliant idea! Mr Dart the previous incumbent had just retired and his successor was to be named the next day. An office filled with inflated condoms would be a jolly jape to welcome him or her into the post. Er…maybe not. Unfortunately, being seventeen our reading matter tended to consist of 2000AD and lurid books about SS Panzer battalions from the cheap bookshop in town. It did not stretch to ‘Porterhouse Blue’ and its potential warning about inflated condoms. What’s more we should never have trusted Pete with the inflation of said condoms as he had never read the book either.<br /><br />The following morning we all arrived bright and early which in itself was unusual given that most of us rolled in sometime after morning assembly just in time for mid morning break and a game of poker before the first lesson of the day. Pete had obviously been in since the crack of dawn as the year masters office was filled with inflated johnnies that resembled oversized maggots. The 90 or so that we had all contributed had been supplemented by a fair few more stolen from Petes parents chemists shop and the room was stuffed as full as it possibly could be. Now all we had to do was attend assembly and discover who the lucky recipient of our splendid wheeze was.<br /><br />Standing at the back we endured the usual badly sung hymns, the congratulations to the first 11 who had managed to escape with a 25-0 mauling against another local school and how the study garden was not to be used to play cricket in. Finally the revelation of who the new sixth form master was came…Mr Bowles, probably the single most humourless individual in the school. Over the years his reputation had grown worse with each passing term. Here was a man who would give a pupil a weeks detention for just standing in the wrong way. We had arranged for his office to be filled with contraceptives. In the back row the entire sixth form went a very pale shade of their usual colour and one thought passed silently through all our minds…”Oooooh fuck!” We were doomed to a lifetime of detention, in fact we would probably be old and grey before we would be let out.<br /><br />Perhaps fortunately for us, at the back of the hall was a cupboard that connected with the PE department changing rooms. Hurriedly, three of us, Nigel, Andy and myself shielded by the rest of the sixth form crawled through this and fled the building, running across to the sixth form common rooms as fast as we could. We had only a short time to get rid of the contraceptives before Mr Bowles turned up as was tradition after the assembly in which he had been named but how could we do it. There were so many in the tiny room we could only just get the door open a crack. There was only one way, burst them with something. But what could we use? Darts! There was a dartboard in the common room, we all used it, we could poke the condoms with darts. There was only one problem with the plan, there were not any darts in the board, most of the players brought their own and kept them in their rucksacks. What about something sharp from the woodwork block next door suggested Nigel so he and I scurried off leaving Andy behind.<br /><br />We had only just reached the door of the woodwork block when behind us we heard what sounded like a series of muffled car backfires, a slightly louder bang and the sound of breaking glass. Running back we crashed back into the common room to find Andy standing by the office door looking somewhat traumatised with a cigarette lighter in hand. Beyond him the sixth form masters office resembled an explosion in a contraceptive factory, which, as we found out later was not far off the mark. We had just enough time to bundle him out of the fire door and run round the building as the rest of the sixth form arrived with Mr Bowles. We had joined the tail end and were witnesses to the look of utter astonishment on his face as he surveyed what was supposed to have been his office but which was now an area of devastation, missing a window pane and littered with singed paper and bits of pink latex. Suffice it to say he was not a happy chap.<br /><br />It was only later we pieced together the whole sorry tale. Pete had indeed arrived early that morning and faced with inflating almost a hundred condoms had cheated a bit and using the gas hose from the oven in the common room kitchen, had filled them with good old North Sea gas. Andy had not really expected them to be inflated with anything but air when, desperate to get rid of the Zeppelin like prophylactics, he had applied his lighter after managing to open the door a crack. At first there had been a brief chain reaction but this, as chain reactions have a tendency to do had turned into something bigger. The resulting gas explosion had blown out one of the window panes and shot a sheet of flame past Andy who had been lucky to have been shielded by the door.<br /><br />The entire sixth form had their privileges revoked for two months, no darts, no cards and were expected to spend their free breaks and lunchtimes studying in the library. We were sternly reminded that condoms were meant for other purposes than blowing up the school, something that may also have been regretted when the head boy was discovered in bed with Miss Wilder, the new gym mistress at an end of term party that year.<br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-55778763939310701182007-10-03T13:30:00.000+00:002007-10-03T13:37:27.565+00:00The Great Rubber Band War<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv0FIszObCob7V71487Kj9PPL1YmQqLBuUhqg5-wOrti-inVTzcsMiERt3-Ont5CuKOplHqJEOnuznH8uEujHwaILLWGpvTQY_ROzEDe5esPI3funO-5kkauUKRrmF0B3R5GorbAxWa48/s1600-h/rubber_band.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5117103808419378114" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv0FIszObCob7V71487Kj9PPL1YmQqLBuUhqg5-wOrti-inVTzcsMiERt3-Ont5CuKOplHqJEOnuznH8uEujHwaILLWGpvTQY_ROzEDe5esPI3funO-5kkauUKRrmF0B3R5GorbAxWa48/s320/rubber_band.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>It probably started like so many conflicts with a relatively minor incident, an Archduke Franz Ferdinand style assassination attempt round the back of the boys toilets perhaps but soon the ‘Great Rubber Band War’ of 1978 had taken a momentum of its own. The minor incident became forgotten as the cries to arms went out. Hit and run border raids on the second year corner of the playground were unleashed and retaliated against and by the end of the week full scale open warfare had broken out. Just about every able-bodied boy in the 1st and 2nd years began packing heat in the form of rubber bands purloined from the bursars stationery cupboard and a pocket full of folded paper pellets.<br /><br />From the stalemate of trench warfare hiding behind the walled flowerbeds of the ‘study garden’ to grand sweeping charges across the playing field nowhere in the school was safe and every break reverberated to the ping of rubber bands and the yelps of the victims as a lucky shot caught them in the back of the neck. Naturally the masters attempted to ‘discourage’ us by confiscating rubber bands and having us turn out our pockets, rucksacks, briefcases and bags but it was not like we were turning up to school with an Uzi and a couple of Glocks like most pupils of today seem to do so on the whole they were fairly laid back about it. After all, nobody was going to get killed, that task was covered by the PE department and their ten mile runs. At least they were laid back about it until the ‘East bank massacre’.<br /><br />The ‘war’ had been humming along nicely for best part of a month. The massed battles had given way to a more static and ambush based conflict. Us 1st years defended our corner of the playground and had made significant gains around the library, Physics building and lower school toilet block. Along with our allies in the 3rd year we also held a chunk of the upper school playground. After a long stalemate and threats of a sound thrashing if we disturbed its solitude ever again, the ‘study garden’ had become neutral territory guarded by the fearsome Mrs Trotter of the music department. The 2nd years held the area around the biology labs, the school gym and the newly built ‘Home Economics’ suite as well as good portion of the area of land that bordered the playing fields. As in other wars our ‘generals’, three of the quieter kids who were members of the school war game club, decided that a major offensive must be launched.<br /><br />Maybe events would have been different if Mike had not decided to up the ante a little with his homemade multi-banded miniature crossbow that could be used to launch inky pellets with the potential to mark our foe as victims of war. Maybe they would have been drastically different if he had not shared his design with the rest of us and we, instead of being the blood-thirsty warriors of the playground out for honour in battle had not copied it in our dads sheds and garages over the weekend and turned up at school the following Monday with an assortment of inky paper projectile launching devices that would make Dennis the Menace go white with fear. Maybe too, things would have not culminated in the ‘East bank massacre’ if our generals had, like generals before and after not been relying on faulty intelligence.<br /><br />Word had gone out that the 2nd form commanders would be gathering on the East bank of the playing fields at lunch break. Here was our chance to break the stalemate by not only capturing the area, but also humiliating their leaders with our new inky artillery. Double maths seemed to last forever that morning as we strained at the leash to launch our attack. No sooner had the lunch break bell rung than we were out of the classroom, stuffing our pre-Jamie Oliver sugar loaded snacks and fish paste sandwiches down our throats as we went, ready to do battle. Our advance parties were already in position, ready to sweep the opposition around the biology labs aside whilst our raiding party moved through to deliver the humiliating blow. At exactly 1pm we went over the top in more ways than one.<br /><br />The few second years that had gathered by the labs were swept aside and our flank attack seized the high ground only to discover that the bank was deserted, no-one in sight. We stood confused for several moments then Mike yelled “I hear them, they’re in the bushes!”<br /><br />With a bloodthirsty scream twenty or so 1st years piled over the top of the bank firing inky pellets. It took at least ten seconds, in which, thanks to Mikes brilliant design of multiple firing mini-crossbows several hundred pellets soaked in blue Quink had been fired, for us to realise that it was not our 2nd form foe that stood before us but Miss Ashton, the biology teacher who had been out gathering bugs for the forthcoming 3rd year double biology period that afternoon. What’s more her white coat looked like it had developed a strange case of blue measles. I can’t remember what I thought at that moment. I think it was something on the lines of “Oh bother!”<br /><br />Suffice it to say that we found ourselves hauled up before the headmaster who, to put it mildly was a little on the unhappy side that one of his staff had been assaulted in such a way. We were lucky to escape with several thousand lines each especially after almost all of us had been forced to desperately hide our sniggers with a variety of coughs, snorts and sneezes when he demanded “So who was it that shot Miss Ashton in the bush then?” </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-48861733533903611992007-09-20T14:25:00.000+00:002007-09-20T14:31:28.170+00:00The Cocktail of Doom<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuIy8AArF6tVSrT-0UG8x7eFZWEM5IkiAsIE1c74Ev6gnv8vALrzQ_qb_7KzcEvKPwqIKo2YMES6a7Z34Als_4MPNRaDOzr3CxF9Nik07NlZ7-F_H0KqyROB4FjEmv9NQ8LaR-w1lK2ag/s1600-h/prawn_cocktail_1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5112292659894861410" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuIy8AArF6tVSrT-0UG8x7eFZWEM5IkiAsIE1c74Ev6gnv8vALrzQ_qb_7KzcEvKPwqIKo2YMES6a7Z34Als_4MPNRaDOzr3CxF9Nik07NlZ7-F_H0KqyROB4FjEmv9NQ8LaR-w1lK2ag/s320/prawn_cocktail_1.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>My father was ex-RAF and had spent much of his younger years pootling about the skies in a selection of very fast aircraft scaring the crap, sometimes quite literally, out of various cows, sheep and the inhabitants of a fair few towns with his low flying antics. Thus it was hardly surprising that when he left the forces it was for an exciting job in middle management in the DIY business much like many of his former colleagues.<br /><br />Malcolm however, was different and had swapped his Biggles-like life of swooping about the skies shooting down ‘bandits’, strafing the natives in the various foreign conflicts of the 1950s and bellowing "Tally-ho chaps!" for the heady excitement of being a sales representative for a well known firm who purveyed dairy goods to the trade. The perks were good though and as Uncle Malc’ was a frequent visitor to our house being one of dads drinking mates we got a fair share of them. Thus it was that one Wednesday in the middle of August 1973 he turned up and unloaded from his van a quantity of a new brand of Yoghurt and what looked like a small oil drum of something. The something turned out to be prawn cocktail.<br /><br />Now as anyone who grew up in the 70s knows, prawn cocktail was the sophisticated dish to serve at your gatherings. No intimate soiree was complete without a bottle of Blue Nun, prawn cocktail and throwing your car keys into a bowl at the end of the evening. Okay, round our way the whole key throwing thing had skipped people by, probably as most of the people who drove only owned a set of tractor keys and the rest had only just crawled from the 19th century and were still wondering what all the fuss was about the internal combustion engine but prawn cocktail was big and suddenly we had about two gallons of it. Naturally enough we got well stuck in and rather tasty it was too.<br /><br />The following day we had prawn cocktail for breakfast, lunch, dinner and we did the same the next day. In fact I think mum even served up prawn cocktail sandwiches and prawn cocktail on toast at some point. By day three I wanted something other than prawn cocktail, even the 30 year old tin of Spam kept in the kitchen cupboard had started to look appetising but we still had a load of the sickly pink goo nestling in our old gas powered fridge.<br /><br />Saturday came and with it came my older cousins Phil and Laura who lived just round the corner. My aunt had promised to take them and myself into town to buy various supplies for the new school term and they had come to collect me. Naturally enough as kids do, Phil started poking round in the fridge to see if he could find anything to eat and discovered the prawn cocktail. Having never had it before both he and Laura asked mum if they could and the answer was “Yes!”, anything to get rid of the stuff and make room for the Sunday joint so they both piled in and against my better judgement I did too, noting as I did that it tasted a bit ‘different’ than it had before but being seven I did not consider anything of it. After that we wandered up to my Aunts house and spent an hour or so mucking around in the back garden as she had a few chores to do before she took us into town. Time to go came and we climbed into the back of her Triumph Herald for the drive into town. Unfortunately for us, it being a summer Saturday, the traffic into town was backed up and in the car it began to get a bit warm. I started to realise that there were distinct rumblings in the Balkans and both Phil and Laura were awfully quiet. Arriving in town and being able to emerge from the car was a blessed relief.<br /><br />Our first port of call that fateful afternoon was a large and well known gentlemen’s outfitters that also had a small section devoted to school uniform for the local schools. The shop itself was old fashioned with wooden counters, hats stored in hat boxes and various items of attire displayed on shelves. It was also cramped, dingy and on that August afternoon decidedly warm. Little did the assistant who emerged to serve us know of the apocalypse that was about to follow. He had just finished measuring Phil for a new blazer when everything erupted, well, when Phil erupted with a monumental “BOIYLLLK!” that covered the counter, a display of shirts and a rack of ties that happened to be in the way. The assistant, big manly man that he was screamed like a girl and leapt backwards just in time to avoid Phils stream of vomit but unfortunately straight into the path of Laura who with a massive and perfectly timed “HOOOORRRP!” sprayed him and an elderly gentleman who had up to that point been innocently trying on hats nearby not expecting to be puked on by a nine year old. In some ways it was good that he was trying the hats on as it meant that unlike my cousins who by now had covered half the shop in vomit I had something to throw up in, the hatbox, which I grabbed and added my own “BLLLEEERCH!” to the proceedings. It was only after that I realised I had grabbed the wrong box and had just brought my boots up over a brand new Homburg.<br /><br />Aunt Anne, being the kind, caring and responsible adult she was, was by now trying to vacate the shop without drawing attention to herself, pretending that she did not know us and had not really brought three apparently demonically possessed children into the shop to let them abuse the customers and staff with foul demonic emanations. Unluckily for her she was spotted and we were ushered back into her care with the words “We’ll send you the bill!” ringing in our ears. It looked like our chances of getting any pocket money for the next twenty years were seriously screwed.<br /><br />Swiftly we were ushered back to the car and in a style of driving that the ‘Sweeney’ would popularise the following year we sped out of town with us kids going a delicate shade of green in the back unsecured by seatbelts and subject to an un-merciless bouncing as Aunt Anne hurtled up the sea road.<br /><br />Now those of you who come here from the Scaryduck blog will know of his frequent bouts of being “sick inna hedge”. It’s very possible we outdid him that day as no sooner had we reached countryside than the Sweeney-like speeding became a stop-start crawl as one of us bolted from the car every two hundred yards. We were sick in hedges, in fields, in a dustbin, in some poor sods Lupin patch, over several walls and in Phils case ‘onna dead badger’ which made him throw up again seconds later. Never have the words “Are we nearly there yet? I’m gonna be sick!” inspired so much terror. Finally though we reached home and as I pelted through the door heading for the bathroom and its merciful absence of shrubbery and dead wildlife I noticed mum and dad tucking in to bowls of prawn cocktail. Impending disaster was not far off.<br /><br />After that the mere mention of it was taboo in our house after the days of family bonding over the toilet that followed and despite its popularity throughout the 70s I don’t think I, or my parents touched it again until I was well into my twenties.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-28113081096554458702007-09-04T13:11:00.000+00:002007-09-04T13:14:26.184+00:00Sports Day<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii0RFv-hduImrZ9wU2BTXKm0tnDaIEUeuUz5ZqT8WCp9G3vUFEaffO3AebDnDTfkQBJFj9V-IItkSKuaa_vFD8cj16ZGSI5nTfrNgacw2_3ook2Tw2JHpSJeUXckiaCVSfo_ip7I71HmI/s1600-h/athletics.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5106336537843804642" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii0RFv-hduImrZ9wU2BTXKm0tnDaIEUeuUz5ZqT8WCp9G3vUFEaffO3AebDnDTfkQBJFj9V-IItkSKuaa_vFD8cj16ZGSI5nTfrNgacw2_3ook2Tw2JHpSJeUXckiaCVSfo_ip7I71HmI/s320/athletics.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>As mentioned on here several times in the past, the school I attended valued sporting prowess as much if not more than academic ability so if you were rubbish at sports you were almost certainly doomed to seven years of being treated with contempt by the sadistic bastards who made up the PE department. Of course the flip side of this was that if you were any good at sports you ended up in one of the school teams which meant after hours training and matches against other schools that were invariably held on a Saturday, a sneaky way of getting extra school attendance out of you when you should have been watching ‘TISWAS’ and stuffing your face with Tartrazine loaded snacks.<br /><br />Thus it became a battle to try to strike a balance between making sure that you did not lose your chance to laze around at the weekend and making sure that you were not labelled a bone idle waster by Messrs Jackson and Stephens and forced to do the kind of physical jerks that could fell most SAS men in the playground in order to toughen you up whilst everyone else played basketball in the nice warm gym. In my case being unutterably crap at football meant that at least once a week I got sent on laps of the field but the rest of the time I managed to just about do enough not to be marked down as a weakling yet avoid getting on any teams. Rugby and cricket I was average at, I could run the four hundred yards and not stagger in last gasping for breath and throwing up behind the biology labs and as for cross country, well most of us had sussed that if we dropped out of sight on the first lap of the school we could have a crafty smoke for twenty minutes, nip out of the side gate and then reappear for the last two hundred yards just behind the keen types who really had done the running and it would look like we had completed the race in an average enough time that would not see us ending up on the cross country team either. There was only one time when we were almost caught out and that was when Kev’ crossed the line with a Lambert & Butler glued to his lip having forgotten to spit it out before he resumed the race. Luckily for us Mr Jackson happened to be looking the other way as Kev’ charged past emitting clouds of smoke like a runaway steam engine.<br /><br />The one fly in the ointment though was school sports day. We have all had to do it at some time in our youth. It’s the day when the PE teachers not content with being the evil, sadistic bastards they are and hounding you round a cold, wet playing field for two hours make you do the self same thing but with an audience of parents and peers to see you stagger in last or try to throw a lump of iron like an uncoordinated chimpanzee on Mogadon in the one sporting event you are absolutely rubbish at yet have been made to do by the PE teachers because they want a bit of a laugh. After all, the sight of Neil in his coke bottle glasses veering off at a tangent into the crowds and the second year kid with the withered arm trying to putt the shot obviously had great comedy value amongst the staff.<br /><br />Apart from football the other event I wasn’t any good at was throwing the javelin or at least it appeared that way. I was in fact very good at it but to ensure that my leisure time was not dented by hurling pointy sticks on a weekend I made it look like I wasn’t that brilliant at it, not completely cack-handed like Pete who managed to spear himself through the foot the first time we were let loose with javelins but not good enough to be noticed and appointed school spear chucker either. Thus on the last sports day before we left school after our ‘O’ levels I found, by some twist of perverse logic in one of the PE masters mind, that I was representing my house in the javelin events.<br /><br />It was possibly because this was the last sports day we would ever have to attend as in the sixth form sport was optional that a certain spirit of rebellion came over me and when it was my turn to throw I thought “Sod it!” and hurled the javelin with all my might which given that I had just hit sixteen was pretty mighty indeed. As it happened the annual spectacle of the teachers versus first year pupils egg and spoon two hundred metres race had just begun and as usual the teachers were about fifty yards ahead of the first year participants who seemed to consist of all the asthmatics and kids who liked their chips too much chosen in order to make the teachers, who apart from Miss Hancock were hardly the fittest of beings, look good.<br /><br />Now, in most normal and sensible athletics stadiums the javelin triangle is marked so that stray missiles pose no threat to spectators and other athletes. At my school it had been decided that as it was obvious no pupil would ever hurl one more than about ten yards, probably because generations of pupils wanting an easy life had never really tried that hard, that the javelin triangle would be marked out straight across the field instead of down it. As I stood and watched the sharp pointy metal thing I had just thrown descend in a graceful arc my thought of “Sod it!” became one of “Ooooo! Shit!”<br /><br />With a thud the javelin fell to earth… slap bang in the middle of the running track about six feet in front of Mr Tate, one of the geography masters, who, unable to stop or react in time went flat on his face over it closely followed by two of the French Masters a history teacher and the head of Biology. The fat and asthmatic kids meanwhile jogged serenely past the teachers lying in a heap on the track, or at least as serenely as it possibly is for someone who is gasping for breath and going a funny shade of blue to jog past and on to the finish line, the first time the teachers had been beaten in about a hundred years. Behind me I could hear the sounds of apoplectic rage and turned to face Mr Jackson who, red faced glared at me for long seconds. Next moment the whole audience of parents, teachers and fellow pupils heard his bellow of “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE BOY…A…A FUCKING ZULU????” echo across the playing field.<br /><br />An hour later, as if to rub it in I was presented with the rosette for first place and over the polite applause of the parents and teachers another sound could be heard, that of three hundred or so of my fellow pupils stamping their feet in a rough approximation of the moment the natives are heard in a certain 1960s film starring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker. Perhaps not surprisingly when the athletics area was marked out the following year the javelin range pointed down the track, not across it.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-35686119646233847612007-08-23T13:44:00.000+00:002007-08-23T13:50:43.624+00:00Death Game 1980<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPcssF3CSKdsqD_T56ZO-oSM1tExribu0BX2BGD9J8D_nm84h4GfYzUJr7D6QxNJG9YxkZ5zIU2HWW81qov6-N9z5lKiCBCo3Ch_zZXJQVuPj2Xw4IExqU5i_0btNEfBmlFhQktxMeCPo/s1600-h/skating1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101891847987866066" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPcssF3CSKdsqD_T56ZO-oSM1tExribu0BX2BGD9J8D_nm84h4GfYzUJr7D6QxNJG9YxkZ5zIU2HWW81qov6-N9z5lKiCBCo3Ch_zZXJQVuPj2Xw4IExqU5i_0btNEfBmlFhQktxMeCPo/s320/skating1.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>“Ridicule is nothing to be scared of!” So sang Adam and the Ants in the early 80s and it was a refrain that went through the heads of the dozen or so of us who had chosen ice skating as our sport of choice when we were allowed to choose whatever sports we wanted to do from the age of 14 at school. Little did our fellow pupils who had called us a “Bunch of poofs!” know as they continued to be hounded around wet and muddy pitches that we had discovered the most monumental skive ever.<br /><br />As a child I had done a bit of skating and won a few awards. The school skating lessons merely went over old ground with the possibility of earning a few certificates that I had skipped having taken the highest level when I was five years old and missed the rest as I could do more than skate forwards and backwards. The instructors put me through my paces and realising that I could actually skate to almost professional standards more or less told me to stop wasting their time and bugger off and do what I wanted whilst they got on with teaching the rest of the class how to stand up and not get a wet arse. In my case doing what I wanted meant honing my talents on the video games and pinball tables and drinking vast amounts of Cola in the rink café as the master in charge of our school was an exceedingly deaf chap called Mr Jennings who was rapidly approaching retirement and who invariably fell asleep on one of the rink side seats.<br /><br />Most weeks were the same. Turn up, put on skates, skate a few circuits, try for a high score whilst waiting for my mates to finish their fifteen minute lesson, play pinball and drink caffeinated beverages then all scarper long before Mr Jennings woke up. All in all it was a total and utter skive. However, one small object was to make things decidedly different.<br /><br />It was Kev’ who decided to liven things up one week by dropping one of those high powered bouncy rubber balls onto the ice. Within minutes a game of ice football had begun and that is where things began to go a bit awry. We shared the rink with a number of other local schools, some of which were our rivals and some of which were the rivals of other schools. Despite its so called ‘Poof’ status skating was always an interestingly edgy affair and violence simmered just below the surface. The game of ice football gradually sucked in more pupils from other schools and began to get a bit more ‘competitive’. It began to resemble less of a school skating session and more an extra brutal real life version of the Action comic strip 'Death Game 1999' of a few years earlier. In fact it is very possible that the writers of the Amiga game ‘Speedball 2’ may have been at that very rink, witnesses to the carnage that was about to break out. There were 500 teenagers on the ice rink; most of them hyped up on cola and sweets from the vending machines and someone had dropped a ball in the midst of them. Blood was going to be spilt. All it needed was for someone to yell “Ice Cream! Ice Cream!”<br /><br />The first casualties were a party from a local Catholic girls school. Whilst their mates tried to cop off with the lads from the local Catholic boys school a few of the ‘wallflowers’ had elected to stay on the ice and skate round holding hands and talking about ponies or something only to be violently cut down by Kev’ who was trying to get the ball from one of the pupils from our rival school by barging him into the side barriers. They went down like ninepins and this was followed seconds later by a St Trinians like scream as the rest of the girls leapt the barrier and went after Kev’. The ball rebounded off the barriers and smacked another lad in the forehead with a resounding ‘CLUNK’. He too went down like a sack of spuds dropped from a great height and at least four other kids went arse over tit over the top of him. The ball meanwhile rolled into the throng and with a few kicks gathered momentum as most of the skaters oblivious to the bodies littering the ice continued to circle menacingly. By now Kev’ was skating for his life pursued by several vengeful girls. Perhaps unluckily the ball chose its moment to return to him and hit his ice skate with some force. The impact caused him to wobble and slip, the resulting tumble propelled him into half a dozen young ladies from one of the more exclusive girls schools in the area…who hated the Catholic girls with a vengeance and thought they had pushed Kev’ into them. Within seconds a full on catfight had broken out and it did not take long for about fifty other kids all bearing grudges or just up for a scrap to pile into the fray. Soon it was like ‘Fight Club’ on ice.<br /><br />Meanwhile, myself and two classmates had grabbed Kev’ from the midst of the brawl and dragged him back to the changing rooms as the rink security and skating instructors joined the battle. As Mr Jennings woke up, disturbed from his nap by the sound of combatants screaming, yelling and trying to batter each other we were standing behind him beaming angelically and pointing out that “We left the ice because some of the other schools were misbehaving and getting rather rough sir!”<br /><br />A few weeks later I was called up on stage during assembly to be presented with a handful of skating certificates by the headmaster. Apparently I had done the school proud by winning so many and in a school that valued sporting achievement that was a high honour indeed. I didn’t have the nerve to tell the headmaster that they had really been earned for drinking cola, getting a high score at ‘Galaxians’ and being part of a near riot that had resulted in most of the local schools being banned from the ice rink for an indefinite period. Luckily we were not one of them and our skiving continued unabated.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-24166815944710313602007-08-16T11:52:00.000+00:002007-08-16T11:59:36.892+00:00Raiders of the lost...AARGH!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsDDlxUaHtGn6gi0DjgwqalgdVRacpWwtf6swcMHFYxtU345kZCD4uDX4fsbYG4rlKKf5r_-PEIvVWn8ZlbfxVttMjjD_nRxU8U0mc0lL6dDG2Km6wi1J9NG0NAszoRWnnJG3_Q1s-x3Y/s1600-h/apples_3.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5099265282212833730" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsDDlxUaHtGn6gi0DjgwqalgdVRacpWwtf6swcMHFYxtU345kZCD4uDX4fsbYG4rlKKf5r_-PEIvVWn8ZlbfxVttMjjD_nRxU8U0mc0lL6dDG2Km6wi1J9NG0NAszoRWnnJG3_Q1s-x3Y/s320/apples_3.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>Nowadays the government and various health professionals relentlessly badger us about getting five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. It did not used to be like that. In fact the quickest way to get a kid to eat fruit was to put it behind a 10’ high wall with a big sign saying ‘Keep Out’ on the gate. If you did that you could guarantee that within an hour of doing so half the neighbourhood kids would have forgotten their ‘Dinosaur chews’, Blackjacks and other treats loaded with enough E numbers to make a Sloth hyperactive and be over the wall and helping themselves to your fruit.<br /><br />Mrs Carters house was one such example. It had originally been a farm on the outskirts of town but time and progress had resulted in it being just another house in the suburbs where my grandparents lived. To the rear of it was an orchard surrounded by a high wall. The only way of getting to it was through a locked door set in the wall, a door with the dire warning ‘DANGER – KEEP OUT’ written on it in six inch high letters. From the lane that ran alongside it we could see the juicy crop of apples, pears, plums and elderberries that grew behind it. We also knew that Mrs Carter, being about eighty would never pick the fruit and resolved to liberate it for ourselves.<br /><br />Thus it was that our gang, hyped up on adrenaline and Corona Limeade gathered in the lane that ran alongside the wall all cunningly disguised in the military camouflage outfits that our parents had purchased from the green shield stamps catalogue. That is all apart from Rachel who turned up in jeans and a Bay City Rollers top so we sent her to the corner to keep a look out whilst the rest of us put the master plan we had cooked up over Jaffa Cakes in Stuarts bedroom into action. We would hoist Elizabeth, her being the lightest up onto the wall with a length of rope from granddads shed. She would drop down the other side, tie it to the nearest tree, toss the rope back over the wall and we would use it to shin up to get at the treasures beyond. Dead easy and utterly foolproof.<br /><br />Now regular readers will know that as soon as the phrase “dead easy and utterly foolproof” is mentioned around here then everything is about to go the same shape as some of the fruit we were trying to ‘liberate’ and this time was no exception. Elizabeth was duly hoisted to the top of the wall and we had no sooner stepped back to check her progress when we heard a most un-nine year old girl like “Oh fuck!” and she vanished from view as the part of the wall she was sitting on crumbled away like the hundred or so year old un-tended wall it was. From beyond we heard the sound of a body and stonework plummeting through undergrowth. As fast as we could, Stuart, Nick and I scrambled up the wall and peered over expecting the worst. Luckily for Elizabeth an Elderberry bush had broken her fall. The bad news was that it was in the middle of a bramble patch.<br /><br />The dire warning of ‘DANGER – KEEP OUT’ probably referred to the fact that Mrs Carter was obviously a mad scientist in disguise and was experimenting in hideous genetic mutations of the carnivorous kind. The orchard was completely overgrown with the kind of brambles not seen outside of the magic forest in ‘Sleeping Beauty’, the kind that thrived on human blood. We could not see Elizabeth but we could certainly hear her. A nearby bush had apparently developed a bad case of sweariness and from it came a stream of “OW! FUCK! OW! OWW! FUCK! SHIT! OW!”<br /><br />If the ‘Ringing Singing Tree’ ever developed Tourettes this would be how it sounded and it may have been this that alerted Mrs Carter to our presence as despite her advanced years she was obviously not deaf and suddenly a window that overlooked the orchard opened. In our haste to get to the fruit we had overlooked one tiny little thing, well, small, four-legged thing. Mrs Carters Jack Russell and it came flying out of the window like a furry missile heading for the extremely sweary bush.<br /><br />It was the thought of being viciously savaged by the dog as well as being torn apart by the brambles o' doom that galvanized Elizabeth into action and suddenly she was free of the brambles and scrambling up the wall. As we dropped down the other side Stuart muttered those famous last words “Phew! Safe!” at the exact moment the dog came hurdling over the wall half way up the lane. How were we to know that there was a pile of rubble at the top end of the orchard that allowed it to reach the top of the wall? What ensued was something out of farce as the neighbourhood was treated to five kids who, with the addition of Rachel looked like refugees from the paramilitary arm of the Bay City Rollers fan club and one of whom looking like they had been dragged through a hedge backwards and indeed had, being chased through the streets by a small but very yappy dog. All that was needed was the music from Benny Hill and the scene would be complete.<br /><br />We must have run around the area for around half an hour and the terrier only gave up when we finally reached Stuarts garden and began pelting it with dirt from the flowerbeds. By the time we got back to our gang ‘hut’ all thoughts of healthy fruit had vanished from our minds. The only fruit we wanted was the ‘Fruit Salads’ and ‘Rhubarb and Custard’ chews we had bought earlier that day.<br /><br />Fate though had other ideas. That weekend my grandmother suddenly announced that she had volunteered my services to someone she knew through her women’s guild. The elderly lady had an orchard full of fruit she needed picking but could not do it by her self and she had already had kids trying to steal the fruit so could I round up some of my friends to do the job for her. Perhaps fortunately for us Mrs Carter’s eyesight was not as good as her hearing as she did not recognize us when we were herded round to her house by my grandmother. The dog was a different matter and his growling and barking made the old lady remark “It’s most odd, he’s not usually like that with children!” We did not dare tell her that it probably had not chased most ‘children’ around the streets for best part of half an hour before having those same ‘children’ proceed to hurl large clods of earth at it. Wisely we kept our mouths shut but the presence of the dog certainly made the afternoon of fruit picking that little bit edgier than it should have been.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-56185986075756891702007-08-09T11:46:00.000+00:002007-08-09T11:52:34.281+00:00The Mystery Mob<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAhxuYJXl5AuhA_t6uPOY_vZSXPUDls4dIX5QL0WPgWl9eL8rLfgCGzF0yR3u0Ha2fLu6qmttC3UMhcWilLuvAuxi9oX2SiWIbbbC4E7KbZsi_y8jdNTuRHx65FGOsnSUg44-dJVS5FnM/s1600-h/derelict_church.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5096666754819173426" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAhxuYJXl5AuhA_t6uPOY_vZSXPUDls4dIX5QL0WPgWl9eL8rLfgCGzF0yR3u0Ha2fLu6qmttC3UMhcWilLuvAuxi9oX2SiWIbbbC4E7KbZsi_y8jdNTuRHx65FGOsnSUg44-dJVS5FnM/s320/derelict_church.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>As a child whose parents both worked, a good proportion of the summer and other holidays were spent with my grandparents. As a result of this I made friends with a number of the kids who lived near them. My grandparents lived in a fairly quiet part of town where nothing much happened and the most exciting thing was the yearly street fair held a few streets away. Us kids however, were determined to make the place a bit more exciting.<br /><br />Stuarts house backed onto my grandparents so a quick climb over the back wall meant that I could be into the old caravan belonging to his dad that we used as a gang hut in moments if I heard a yell from his garden. So it was on this particular day. Like most summer days seemed back then it was warm and sunny, too warm to be running around playing soldiers even with water pistols so we were slumped around the caravan, bored, slurping on a selection of Panda Pops liberated from Stuart’s mums kitchen, the stack of Beezer and Victor comics read through and the prospect of a long afternoon with nothing to do apart from go a bit hyper on the E numbers in the Panda Pops ahead of us. The trouble with being nine and bored is that it isn’t long before someone suggests doing something really, really stupid and the others instead of saying “That’s a really, really stupid idea!” all say “Cool!”<br /><br />It was Elizabeth, one of the two female members of our gang who suggested that we explore the old church just around the corner. The church had probably been built in the late 18th or early 19th century when the area was not as large as it was and then as the area thrived and gained several more churches and many more houses it had become a back street chapel and then become run down and abandoned prior to WW2. It was grimy, boarded up, in disrepair and was reputed to be haunted by spirits disturbed when it was almost hit by a bomb in the early years of the war. Basically it was the place that our parents, grandparents and most of the adults in the neigbourhood warned us to keep well away from. Oh and then there were the Satanic sacrifices that a kid at Stuarts school reckoned he had found in there although according to Stuart the same kid reckoned he had been abducted by aliens, was part bionic and had discovered a secret bunker under the school playground full of guns and tanks. However, with nothing better to do we might as well check to see if the story was true. Having watched Scooby Doo we all fancied ourselves as the Mystery Mob although lacking any canine pets between us there was some argument as to who got to be the cowardly dog. The alternative was to borrow my grandmother’s pet budgerigar and put a collar on it and somehow I didn’t think that she would approve of that. So, arming ourselves with high power torches, well, okay two reasonable power torches and third that was a gift from a seaside vending machine and shaped like a fish we set off on our expedition.<br /><br />Getting in to the old church was easy enough, it was a simple matter of climbing over the wall whilst avoiding the barbed wire and broken glass that someone had thoughtlessly arrayed across the top of it to keep small children and tramps out, picking our way across the small overgrown graveyard without breaking our legs, necks and other body parts tripping over fallen tombstones and slipping through a hole in the corner of the rusty and jagged corrugated iron sheet that covered one of the doors without getting tetanus.<br /><br />If restless spirits were looking for a place to hang out and do the things that restless spirits are wont to do then this was it, a definite des-res for the dead and not quite shuffled off to the afterlife to get down and party. It was dark, spooky and filled with rubble and pigeon shit. Despite the warmth outside there was a noticeable chill in the air and there were strange rustlings in the corners that our frankly feeble torches could not penetrate. As we explored we heard a door banging, floorboards creaked as though someone was walking upon them and the wind sighed through gaps where the boards did not quite cover the windows.<br /><br />By now four out of the five of us were thinking that maybe going into the old church was a really, really bad idea and that maybe instead of saying “Cool!” we should have pointed out how incredibly bad an idea it really was. Nervously we looked each other as dust illuminated by one of the few shafts of light that penetrated the boards swirled in strange vortices across the floor. Stuart’s brother, Nick laughed and forged ahead of us. Then came a ghastly creaking and a hideous scream of abject pant wetting terror...<br /><br />...and that's when we found out that no self respecting Satanist would ever hold a black mass in there. Their health and safety executive would have had a fit if they had. The raising of demons would have been unlikely, the high priest and most of the coven plunging to their doom was a distinct probability. Nick vanished through the floorboards that had been somewhat weakened by time, hungry woodworm and a bad case of dry rot. Luckily for him it was not too big a drop, about six feet, into the void under the floor and he landed on an old and musty smelling tarpaulin.<br /><br />Nervously in case he had been grabbed by ghouls or zombies lurking under the floor we crawled to the edge of the pit only to discover him lying on the tarpaulin surrounded by nothing more sinister than ancient mouse droppings and staring up at us. The distance was not that great but it took us ages to haul him out, getting ourselves covered in dust and desiccated mouse poo in the process. I'm not sure what was more terrifying, the moment Nick vanished or the telling off I got from my grandmother when I got home looking like I had just crawled from the grave myself. At least in Scooby Doo the kids always discovered that the phantom was really old Mr Brown the janitor, they did not get sent to an early bath and told to get themselves to bed and not to darken the house with their presence until the next day.<br /><br />After that we gave the place a wide berth and decided that if anyone suggested an idea that sounded ‘cool’ we would pelt them with clods from the compost heap. Well, until someone suggested finding the secret bunker underneath the school but that’s another story.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-16505677347379540982007-08-02T12:01:00.000+00:002007-08-02T12:02:42.868+00:00Kaboom<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm8QuHS5eNvmEPpDPgqW3KTayRO5s856-a6LDgT-BuDH30EhhyphenhyphenN_McYAdSkraJ5Aje27-ur07gj37yCFCFltC-jJ4uIet1W-SCve6ICdkEkwjI9fDuztuHbU3D8R7GzJF2sbVtR-uGRns/s1600-h/explosion2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5094072336874351650" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm8QuHS5eNvmEPpDPgqW3KTayRO5s856-a6LDgT-BuDH30EhhyphenhyphenN_McYAdSkraJ5Aje27-ur07gj37yCFCFltC-jJ4uIet1W-SCve6ICdkEkwjI9fDuztuHbU3D8R7GzJF2sbVtR-uGRns/s320/explosion2.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>As regular readers will know, as a child I was fairly obsessed with making loud bangs with homemade explosives, napalm and the like. Back then it was the sort of thing any ordinary child whose grandfather was a scientist and of Irish extraction did and unless we blew up the old folks home or burnt down the school nobody really took that much notice unlike now when just striking a match gets you a quick ticket on an unmarked aircraft heading for the Caribbean and a nice orange jumpsuit.<br /><br />When I was 12 a woman and her daughter moved in next door. I soon discovered that she was the type to complain about anything and everything, especially anything that disturbed her wet blanket of a daughter who was something of a sensitive soul despite being about 18 at the time. For three years I suffered being complained about if a football sailed within ten feet of her house or if I was spotted with a cricket ball, tennis ball or even a bag of marbles anywhere in the neighbourhood. Such items could be lethal if they came in contact with her daughter. That is if her daughter ever left the safety of the house, which was something of a rarity. It was possible she could not actually get out as her mother had taped the windows shut in case any insects got in and caused her daughter to be frightened. In fact, my mere existence and the existence of any child in the neighbourhood was a cause for immediate complaint. Little did I know as I was hauled before my parents over some minor incident on a roughly twenty times a week basis that in my fifteenth year revenge would be spectacular…<br /><br />It was bonfire night 1981 and I had a couple of my mates around for a bonfire party and to fill our faces with my mothers top quality cheese and bacon scone. Between us we had acquired an industrial quantity of top quality Chinese fireworks from the local joke shop instead of the more usual and somewhat tamer ‘Standard’, ‘Astra’ and ‘Brocks’ varieties. For so called ‘Garden Fireworks’ they made some pretty fearsome bangs, roars, pretty lights and the occasional crater in dads flowerbeds. Nowadays they would probably be banned or if not banned, they would only be sold to responsible adults who had letters from the police, the vicar and at least three magistrates to prove their utter responsibility to be let anywhere near high explosives. They certainly would not have been in the hands of three fifteen year old pyromaniacs with a box of matches. In the case of some of the rockets even we were not sure whether to send them skywards or keep them in case the cold war Communist threat saw Warsaw pact tanks rolling down our leafy suburban streets. These things would take out an armoured column, no problems.<br /><br />After several hours worth of screeches, thuds, a near miss that almost removed our other neighbours television aerial and only two complaints from the local airport about anti-aircraft fire downing the 8.15 mail plane, we had just finished making the neighbourhood sound much like downtown Baghdad does nowadays when who should appear but the neighbour to complain that the noise of our fireworks had "made my daughter wet her knickers in terror!"<br /><br />Now what total spoon says to a bunch of fifteen year olds with particularly hyperactive imaginations and three years of complaining to gain revenge for that they had made a 21 year old woman wee herself and not expect something to be triggered in said fifteen year olds minds? Especially as over the years her complaints about us playing football, cricket and even just lounging around the back lawn of my house had curtailed our leisure activities most severely. In the annals of stupid things to say that one sentence has to rate pretty highly. In fact it probably rates up there with “That Mr Hitler is a very nice man, he’ll never invade Poland”<br /><br />Naturally this little fact fermented in our minds until a month or so later when the chance for spectacular revenge presented itself not so much on a plate as on a silver salver carried by a retinue of liveried footmen. Despite her utter wet blanket-ness the daughter owned a moped. Presumably she was unaware that mopeds might be even slightly dangerous. This was kept at the back of the house and to get there she had to wheel it down an alleyway between my house and hers. At one end of the alleyway was a flight of steps with a surrounding wall leading up to her garden that she had to pass. Every day at 5.30 on the dot she would arrive home and her mother would come out to help her push the moped down the alley to the back of the house as it was way too dangerous for her to do it by herself.<br /><br />As it happened, on the day in question I had discovered a large banger left over from bonfire night that I had sort of increased the power of a bit, possibly to take out a tank or two that the rockets had missed. My two mates and I just happened to be outside at 5.30pm wondering what we could blow up. It was after all far better than doing maths homework. We saw mother and daughter arrive at the end of the alley with the moped and under the cover of darkness the banger was lit and lobbed behind the wall that surrounded the steps as we ducked behind my fathers shed.<br /><br />The detonation could not have been better timed if we had tried. Just as they were about six feet from the wall it went off behind the brickwork...<br /><br />BLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMM!!!!<br /><br />It was closely followed by dual screams of "AAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!!!!" and "YAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGGHHHH!!!" and seconds later a whimper of "Muuuummm! I've pooed and wet myself!"<br /><br />Meanwhile the three of us were hiding behind the garden shed trying not to wet ourselves either. Not through terror but because we were in absolute hysterics as the moped was forgotten and the daughter waddled inside like a cowboy who had forgotten his horse.<br /><br />Unfortunately a few hours later the neighbour turned up on our doorstep to regale my parents of how their son had made her daughter...well, you already know that. I was hauled out and given a right royal bollocking for it and the fact that my IED might have blown up the moped with apocalyptic consequences. I was made to apologise profusely but when the door was shut and she had gone my dad nearly bust a gut laughing. From what I could gather he and mum were fed up with this woman and her daughters constant moaning about everything as well and considered it justice well done. Oddly I got a pocket money rise soon after. Nowadays it would have got me an ASBO.<br /><br />The next day a solitary pair of Bridget Jones pants appeared on the washing line next door as if to signal our victory to the entire neighbourhood and for several years to come every kid in the neighbourhood referred to the daughter as ‘John Wayne’. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-24320649646476251252007-07-25T12:40:00.000+00:002007-07-25T12:44:07.091+00:00Football Crazy<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyGhyphenhyphenm6k-SCSonSNEzy4fKf8KzBxm57V0a0y60s3L5Jv6IzI8-ONrjtqhuLubJg9a9W433C36nkQAOmxYDZ0JSHfmWV0S3wufnalBeU-NZtAosMSAhg2HQDX0fJ7hUgUNZIN_b2QSmq3Y/s1600-h/football.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5091113688522959858" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyGhyphenhyphenm6k-SCSonSNEzy4fKf8KzBxm57V0a0y60s3L5Jv6IzI8-ONrjtqhuLubJg9a9W433C36nkQAOmxYDZ0JSHfmWV0S3wufnalBeU-NZtAosMSAhg2HQDX0fJ7hUgUNZIN_b2QSmq3Y/s320/football.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br />Unlike my uncle Ernest who had played professional football in the 1930s and several other members of my family who could be found kicking a ball around the local park pitches as part of the Sunday League my own football skills left a lot to be desired. To tell the truth, an uncoordinated Gibbon on tranquillisers could have probably played the beautiful game better than I could. I loved football but put a ball anywhere near me and I immediately developed two left feet and a terminal loss of direction. Naturally this led to me being relegated to the side that included the asthmatics, the academics and the blind kid with the gimpy leg when it came to school games lessons and in a school that valued sporting prowess as much as and possibly more than academic achievement this was a bad thing indeed. Even though I was not too bad at cricket and could hurl javelins with the best of them my total inability to send a football in the right direction marked me as a useless loser in the eyes of certain masters.<br /><br />One such master happened to be our games master who was an ex-paratrooper by the name of Jackson and who it was rumoured had been kicked out of the regiment for brutality. He loathed any sign of weakness and being useless at football was a sign of weakness in his book so he took it on himself to toughen us up by any means possible. This usually took the form of ten laps of the school field and an hour and a half of trying to kick a heavy leather ball that had been manufactured circa 1863 around the flooded bottom pitch that was rumoured to harbour a breeding colony of crocodiles and a couple of hippos in its swampy environs. By the end of the session most of us would be tottering around on leaden limbs and doing passable impersonations of a Glastonbury reveller on a particularly muddy day. Broken legs were not uncommon and the local ambulance service kept one of its vans permanently parked outside the gates that led to the fields. The lesson would normally be overseen by Jackson and the slightly effeminate maths teacher Mr Davies, to whom Jackson had been heard referring to in an unguarded moment in the PE masters staff cupboard as “That Welsh poof!”. That Mr Jackson himself had been relegated to teaching the uncoordinated and the sporting inept amongst us said a lot about what the head of PE thought of him as he was never let anywhere near the star pupils who could actually kick a ball. We hated the man with a vengeance but revenge was to be at hand albeit unintentionally.<br /><br />The games lesson had begun normally enough with its lung bursting run around the periphery of the field that had left several of our group throwing up behind the pavilion and Neil whose bottle bottom glasses had steamed up getting severely lost and vanishing at a tangent behind the biology labs. Despite the losses Mr Jackson then produced the ‘Cannonball’ as we called it and those of us who were left were divided into two teams. For about an hour the game progressed without incident. Occasionally one of us even managed to coordinate our limbs for long enough to get a shot somewhere within fifty feet of a goal, which was lucky as both the goalies were asthmatic and any further exertion would have probably killed them. Then it happened. The ball suddenly landed at my feet and I heard Jackson’s bellow of “Run with it laddie!” from nearby. Mortal terror kicked in and I froze. I knew that if I tried to run with the ball I would inevitably end up on my arse in the mud, such was my lack of coordination in the vicinity of spherical objects on football pitches. I could hardly pick the ball up as we were not playing rugby that term. Thus I did the only thing possible and gave the sodden leather ball as mighty a kick as I could possibly manage.<br /><br />True to form, the ball, instead of sailing gracefully up the field to where team mates stood waiting in hopeful expectation, or possibly waiting to see which of them the ball was headed for so that they could run away from it, shot off my boot at an angle and at high speed like a navigationally challenged Cruise missile. With a loud and sickening thump it thudded into Mr Jackson or more precisely an area slightly south of his waistline. The sound brought play to a halt not only on our pitch but the top pitch as well as even the head of PE winced. Only I was close enough to hear the strangled “Meep!” as Mr Jackson folded to his knees and curled into a foetal position in the soggiest, muddiest part of the pitch. His whistle slipped from his lips and tears rolled down his ashen cheeks as he lay there for several moments before rising unsteadily to his feet and as he staggered back to the changing rooms clutching his injured groin, Mr Davies was heard to add insult to injury with the polite enquiry of “So, do you need some liniment rubbing into that?”<br /><br />Luckily the football term ended that week but we were treated to the sight of Mr Jackson wearing an uncharacteristically baggy pair of trousers and never once sitting down for several days afterwards and all those present at the time agreed that the ball could not have been better targeted than if George Best himself had kicked it. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-13888320033038935282007-07-12T13:49:00.000+00:002007-07-12T14:08:11.682+00:00Booze Club<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRzffLG0Jks9oHjRzyPZVLhoLrehYhDt6T57mKnPxuHbEHJ9f4pR2MW0woe4KBgcxCqINpjxTfAssUTuNK1CeJm3oC3p_5EIyaUyyqfEyBB9bQvtgyMHvhUGDmDS8nZ4zwRgdbNCSpHQ8/s1600-h/bar_1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5086309471211468882" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRzffLG0Jks9oHjRzyPZVLhoLrehYhDt6T57mKnPxuHbEHJ9f4pR2MW0woe4KBgcxCqINpjxTfAssUTuNK1CeJm3oC3p_5EIyaUyyqfEyBB9bQvtgyMHvhUGDmDS8nZ4zwRgdbNCSpHQ8/s320/bar_1.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>Our Chemistry master, Mr Roberts, was an extremely trusting soul, perhaps a little too trusting of our sixth form chemistry group given that in the eighteen months he had been teaching us we had managed to almost gas the school, leave a large smoking crater in a demonstration bench after a thermite reaction went a bit wrong and nearly kill the headmaster as well. Perhaps these incidents had slipped his mind on the day he asked us to bring some alcohol in to the next weeks lesson for an experiment in distillation.<br /><br />I’m sure he only meant for us to bring a small amount of alcohol in to school but when the fateful day arrived it came with the sound of clinking bottles from various rucksacks and shoulder bags. Taking his request a bit too literally we had all raided our parents wine cellars, sideboards and cupboards under the stairs and had with us a selection of booze that could have kept George Best, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and most of the tramps that gathered in the local park unconscious for about a week. Pete, our resident punk rocker had even lugged a gallon jug of 'Old Rats Arse' or some equally potent scrumpy in, presumably provided by one of his older mates whom he frequently got drunk with on the local green. Perhaps wisely, lest the boys toilet become more like a smoke filled pub than it usually was, other teachers insisted we left our experimental materials in the science lab so it was thus that the fume cupboard came to resemble a well stocked hostelry instead as the various bottles liberated from parents boozes stashes were stacked within. In theory only a small amount would be needed for the experiment, the teachers were already eyeing up the rest.<br /><br />Our chemistry lesson was the last two periods of the day, in the afternoon and it started innocuously enough…as most disasters do. It started with us distilling the Sherry Simon had stolen from his mum to produce neat alcohol. From there it went downhill. Bored with setting it, whatever and whoever we could pour it over on fire we wondered what else we could do with the positive cornucopia of alcoholic delights arrayed on the bench before us.<br /><br />As fate would have it, about halfway through the lesson Mr Roberts was called away to deal with a problem and being the trusting soul he was left us on our own. It was then that Mark decided to see what his grandmothers’ Sanatogen tonic wine tasted like and before long bottles were being passed around like a wine and cheese evening where the host had forgotten the Gouda. I had ‘borrowed’ two bottles of my fathers homemade Orange wine, this, most of the participants in that Bacchanalian excess swear to this day was our undoing. Calling it wine was a bit of an understatement. If his Elderberry 1978 was a cheeky little number, his Orange wine was like being slapped in the face with a large and very alcoholic cricket bat. In fact I firmly believe that my father was in talks with NASA as they wanted it to fuel their space shuttles. In terms of alcohol content only certain hard to find vodka and the methylated spirits the corner hardware shop sold ranked above it. Generous amounts were sloshed into some of the cleaner beakers that may or may not have been used in experiments involving poisons and knocked back leaving participants gasping at what was described as ‘a bit of pokey old tackle’ by another mate in later years. In fact, if prohibition had been in force my father could have expected a visit from Elliot Ness and the boys with a selection of axes and a warrant that would send him to Alcatraz for life.</div><div><br />Either the problem that Mr Roberts was dealing with was a serious one or he had completely forgotten that he was supposed to be teaching and had wandered off somewhere as by now he had been gone for almost an hour and the effects of our rapid alcohol consumption had kicked in as unlike current teenagers who spend their time hanging around in bus shelters with a bottle of Bucky and of course Pete, the most any of us had consumed was a small white wine, some of Auntie Mabels Port or a lemonade shandy made with the weakest beer our parents could find on Christmas day. Mark began to look green round the gills, Karen and Rachel were slumped against the cupboards at the back of the labs, Chris had wandered off down the corridor in a daze humming the Wombles theme tune and apparently “Looking for some ice!” and Andy was face down amidst a sea of beakers. As for me, I was attempting to convince Martin that mixing all the booze that was left into one super cocktail was probably a bad thing to do. Unfortunately I was having little success, mainly down to my own advanced state of inebriation. Grans Advocaat had never had this sort of effect on me but then again I had never sunk an entire bottle of it washed down with a gin chaser and a bucket of meths.<br /><br />We might have managed to get away with it if nobody had spotted us weaving our way out of the school gates at home time and providing none of the teachers turned up. It wasn’t to be and for us it could only get worse as the headmaster, alerted to what was happening by Chris stumbling into his study demanding “Ishe cubes”, arrived just as Andy woke up and went “BLLLEEERCH!” into one of the sinks. The head took one look at the semi-conscious bodies slumped around the lab, Pete hugging the remains of his gallon of cider and Martins super-cocktail that was bubbling away lethally on the front bench and asked what was probably the stupidest question of his life…<br /><br />”What on earth do you think you’re doing?”<br /><br />Looking back, Martins slurred answer of “Biology experiment sir, Effects of alcohol on human metabolishm. Been a bit too succeshful!” as he slowly toppled from his stool may have been the wrong one but it was absolutely inspired at the time. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4838587929001203471.post-42834113637631821472007-07-05T12:11:00.000+00:002007-07-05T12:23:54.055+00:00Hurrah for Saint George!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWfaSXkoVJV6D7JikkWWh7Nu0aVYSE33ZHVH5op02Xro7MR2BWaIV3C-S8lHFaptSkKf4WKQnQZwWH5nVeHMNgPoXNAR2LyVSg4GNu9zZgagfZcmcDnosewv-Pox_-vr-21E1jyErKDRc/s1600-h/St_George.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5083684580200085298" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWfaSXkoVJV6D7JikkWWh7Nu0aVYSE33ZHVH5op02Xro7MR2BWaIV3C-S8lHFaptSkKf4WKQnQZwWH5nVeHMNgPoXNAR2LyVSg4GNu9zZgagfZcmcDnosewv-Pox_-vr-21E1jyErKDRc/s320/St_George.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>In a moment of patriotic fervour that nowadays would have a mob of the towns politically correct, sandal munching, lentil wearing brigade writing letters to the local council and picketing the school gates Mrs Smith, my 3rd year junior teacher decided that it would be a good idea to put on a play about St George and the dragon for our long suffering parents instead of the usual Easter pageant. If she had known the pain and anguish the change from the usual fluffy bunnies and chicks would cause she would have stuck to something safer like the life and times of Jack the Ripper, the battle of Thermopylae or maybe a recreation of the Normandy landings with real guns.<br /><br />For most of us our acting careers consisted of the school nativity play or if you were really lucky a part in the summer pageant. I fell into the latter and as part of the school summer fair I got to be in the presentation about historical happenings. In it I was a sailor, not just any sailor, no, one who was to die of plague. Buying water from an itinerant water seller we succumbed to the black death in seconds, possibly the fastest succumbing ever and three of us spent the rest of the presentation lying on the tarmac of the playground wondering if this would get us our equity cards. Instead it got us a polite round of applause and a chance to skive off early and get the best of the pickings on the homemade cake and bric-a-brac stalls. However, Mrs Smith had grander designs and as part of our patriotic presentation I got to be the arse end of the dragon complete with diving flipper feet and that’s where I think it started to go wrong.<br /><br />The dragon costume was fashioned from an old blackout curtain covered with tin foil scales and finished with a papier mache head made by the ‘special’ kids in the form that looked less like a dragon and more like the mutant offspring of a coupling between a penguin and a rhino. Myself, Dave and another kid called Mike made up the human part that made it move around in a vaguely dragon like way although it has yet to be proved that dragons shuffled around at about 1/10th of a mile per hour emitting the occasional half hearted "GRRR!" as they did so.</div><div> </div><div> Okay, nothing too bad about that apart from the fact that Mike was form 3Bs champion farter. We were all convinced his mum must feed him nothing but baked beans and Brussels sprouts for every meal of the week. As soon as he got the slightest bit nervous or excited he would begin to break wind uncontrollably so as a result as soon as he was asked a question by the teacher almost every lesson would be disrupted by FAAAAAAAAARRRRPPP and moments later the kind of smell banned by several international treaties would waft across the classroom sending pupils rushing for the windows with watering eyes. As the back end of the dragon my head was to be uncomfortably close to the source of those emanations and all I could do was pray that his nerves would hold and he could control himself for the ten minutes we were to be on stage.<br /><br />After weeks of practice and mercifully for me, no problems from Mikes rear quarters, the big day arrived, parents assembled in the school hall and as an extra special treat the inmates of the old folks home across the road were wheeled out and took place in the front row and so the play began. It all went quite well. The girls were suitably terrified by our first appearance, the choir sung their song about dragons and St George heroically set off on his quest riding his horse made from an old cardboard box painted in a horsey sort of brown with a hobby horse head poking from it and on meeting us lot in our dragon costume set about us with his sword somewhat enthusiastically and that’s when it went horribly, horribly pear shaped.<br /><br />Whether it was the enthusiastic beating or just sheer excitement that our big moment had arrived the terror began…<br /><br />“Have at thee!” yelled St George.<br /><br />PHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP replied the dragon closely followed by my anguished scream of “ARGH! Fucking Hell!” as Mike let rip with the ripest, juiciest fart he had ever let rip with and I tried to escape the noisome cloud in the confines of the blackout curtain. Unfortunately the fact I was wearing diving flippers meant that going anywhere fast was difficult and as it happened, fate stuck its fingers into the mix and one of the straps on my flippers broke. Coughing and gasping and fighting to get clear the inevitable happened, I tripped over the flipper and the momentum of my fall toppled us off the stage and into the elderly residents of the old folks home who had up to that point been enjoying themselves. We landed in an explosion of papier mache, chicken wire, tin foil, dentures, Zimmer frames and walking sticks, flattening at least six of the poor old folk. Parents stood aghast as the teachers rushed in to save the elderly guests from a hideous fate in the form of a blackout curtain that was emitting curious FARP, FARP, FARP noises and from which a hades-like stench arose whilst two of their pupils crawled away to be sick in the rubber plant that stood next to the stage. At least two of the pensioners had begun having flashbacks to the Somme and had started screaming “GAAAASSSS!” and a third was poking the curtain with her walking stick, which merely inflamed the situation as Mike, tangled in the material let fly with another fruity barrage. Parents, pensioners and teachers alike began to evacuate the hall holding handkerchiefs over their noses leaving Dave and I to drag Mike from the curtain before throwing up in the plant pot again.<br /><br />The next day the school hall was placed out of bounds and the windows were left open. Nothing was ever mentioned about the play again but we did notice the headmaster carrying large baskets of fruit and several bottles of wine across to the old folks home a couple of days later. Oh and Mrs Smith mysteriously left the school at the end of the summer term never to return or be talked of again. Presumably haunted by the day she almost managed to do what ‘the hun’ had failed to do and finish off several WW1 veterans in an unprovoked attack with chemical weapons of mass destruction in the guise of a school play.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4