My kids are ok..
I have two boys aged three and six, they’re hearty and happy, polite and helpful and rarely naughty but they can be mischievous and will push boundaries like any other kid..

They’re in no way above a good bollocking, but by and large I have few reasons to complain about my lot..

This morning I lay in bed with one ear open getting a bit of extra rest while they played in their room..

Like all parents I guess, there are things in the home that are kept out of reach, on high shelves, on top of wardrobes etc.. Precious things
One such item in my house is a box of rolled up sketches and papers associated with my work as a painter, which is kept on top of a wardrobe.. Also in this box is a poster, a single layer screen print from the early 60s, promotional material for a small rock n roll band that found a little success around the nightclubs of Germany in the wake of The Beatles..
My dad was the bass player in the band and although he died when I was six I have no recollection of him as he and my mother divorced when I was a baby.. Other than a handful of photographs he left little behind on this earth in the way of evidence to prove of his existence..

When I crawled from my bed this morning to make breakfast etc, the kids were keen to show me that they had been wrapping their toys with some wrapping paper they had found..

My poster of dad’s band is in tatters.. A unique historical artefact, the only one on the planet as far as I’m aware is now gone..

Tell me your tales of woe relating to the terrible mishaps of your own little cherubs to cheer me up

My step sister cut out a nice picture of Piglet to stick on her exercise book.

It was one of 2 versions of early sketches by E.H. Sheppard of Pooh & Piglet.

My step mother still has the other one, it is valued at around £30,000

When my littlest one was born, his brother, then 3, came up and showed us the beautiful ‘arts and craft’ he had made by punching dozens of holes in an envelope with a hole punch. An envelope containing the baby’s birth certificate.

Not quite on the same scale, but I as a child removed a used tea bag from the (cold) teapot.

I proceeded to swing it furiously like a windmill. Queue a tea-stain-streak across the carpet, up one wall, across the ceiling and down the other wall.

Like a Saturn ring it was.

But Mr Overshoot, if both sketches still existed, they’d only be worth £15,000 each.
It’s like Arthur Hind destroying one of the two remaining magenta stamps (allegedly).

Not on the same scale, but when we were kids my brother and I cut open my Grandma’s curtains to get the treasure that was hidden in the hems. We had never come across curtain weights before 😀

Not on the receiving end as I have no kids but as very young children my brother and I were given small pen knives as a gift. On one Saturday afternoon my parents left said brother and me in the car while they had a wander around a garden centre. We stabbed the living shit out of the front seats all the while screaming stuff like “This is the Joker. This one’s Penguin…!”

They returned to seats covered in tiny little stab holes. I mean, loads of them. For some reason I can’t recollect the outcome…

But you must be gutted, Yunki.

One Xmas either me or my cousin got a small set of screw drivers, must have been around seven. We went out and found this nice old scooter in the parking area and decided to unscrew and dismantle every part we could. The owner was not impressed. Luckily most of it was put back together…

I dont have any. Life is great 😀
I do recall, or rather my father does, that when I was a brat my mother allowed me to roll his Elvis records around on the kitchen floor scratching them to buggery in the process! Why I don’t know.

No kids myself but as a child my mum left my nan looking after me and I did something wrong, can’t remember what it was but nan sent me to my room.

Bored I went for a wander in the spare room ( nan was a bit deaf so could hear me snooping about ) and found a tin of black gloss paint and preceded to find a paint brush and paint the stairs wall and spindle in black paint.

I got in big trouble……

Ever seen kids use freshly laid lawn turf to roll themselves up and down a garden in? Patios are so much nicer, don’t you think?

Yunki, I hope you’ve saved the pieces, an art restoration place should be able to make it good as new when time and funds allow.

I once did a great picture of a house.

On the living room wall.

Scratched with a drawing pin, rather than drawn.

We lived in RAF married quartets at the time. 😳

When small in the kitchen we had a Welsh dresser decorated with my mothers best crockery and tea set.
While she was upstairs I decided to climb up the dressers shelves like a ladder resulting in my pulling the whole thing over in a mighty crash.

After which I scarpered outside as quickly as possible and stayed there until it got dark. When I then decided I would have to go home and face the music fully expecting a telling off so was very surprised to be greeted with a big cuddle from a mother who was clearly pleased to see me.

She later went on to tell me that the dog must have knocked the dresser over that afternoon destroying all that was on it. It was only recently I told her the truth clearing my poor long dead dogs name.

My brothers two young step sons in a bid to extract some extra pocket money decided to wash his car while he was at work.
Problem being, being so small found it tough to get clean due to them being short on elbow grease, and solved this problem by swapping their soft sponges for pan scourers.
He sold the car shortly afterwards.

Not long after learning to ride a bike my dad showed me that wiping my bike down with a rag dampened with diesel put a shine on it and kept rust at bay

I returned the favour by doing the same with his car………..

married quartets

Swinging sixties?

8)

Shameful confession time….

When my brother was learning to write the first thing he learned was a big wide H like a bedstead. I scratched the same H on the freshly-primed bathroom door and my Dad walloped my poor brother. Still feel awful about that, almost 50 years later.

Its not just children. My dad was a pretty shit-hot silversmith in his early days, to the extent that theres now a Silversmithing Scholarship in a US university that was named after him after he died – remarkable particularly as he’s never been to the US, and more so because he pretty much stopped silversmithing in the late 60s/early 70s as his work in education took over, so hadn’t been practicing for 40 odd years.

One of his particular skills, aside from quite innovative design, was items with perfect fits – he’d set some gold sovereigns into a silver bowl so perfectly that the Assay Office didn’t believe he hadn’t soldered them and threatened to prosecute him.

He also made a silver box with a hinge where the fit was so perfect, and the friction in it was just ‘so’ that the lid would balance open in any position. It was a piece of work he was really proud of, and didn’t really want to sell so instead he gave it to his brother in law as a wedding present. Several years later he was offered an exhibition that was a sort of retrospective so he had to contact that people he’d given or sold work to in order to loan the work back for display. His brother in law posted the silver box to him, wrapped in just brown paper and string. When he opened the torn package a slot had be chiselled in the top with a screwdriver so it could be used as a piggy bank. 🙂

From my childhood…. I imagined poster paint was far less permanent that it really is, so dipped tennis balls in different coloured paints and playing squash against the side of the house, for an hour or so. Its remarkably permanent – about 20 – 25 years I’d say before it ceased the be visible enough to be a talking point with every new visitor to the house. I wasn’t even all that young at the time.

As a child my summer weekends were often spent at the cricket club while my dad was keeping wicket and my mum was either scoring or helping our with the teas me and the other kids would play in the farmers fields, hedgerows building dens and generally getting up to all sorts of wholesome outdoor activities, except one time, when a friend and I decided it would be better to practise our drawing and writing skills, with nails, on a car in the car park (I think it was a merc), of course it didn’t last long and we soon forgot about it an moved back to the hedgerows and thought no more about it until several hours later a rather grumpy looking man came back into the clubhouse after putting his kit away.

Strangely he knew exactly which parents to go to, not because I was especially naughty and had a reputation you understand, oh no, I was quite the good little boy, so how did he know it was me? Becasue I’d written my name on most of the panels in foot high letters 😳

Mum and dad were less than impressed, fortunately he saw the funny side of it and claimed on his (company) insurance. 😀

a long, long time ago (aged about 7 I think) me and Brian were mooching around the rear garden of Brians large house (behind the workshops, lorries etc etc down to river), amazingly we found this cracking, large white raft just lying there, ideal. Dragged it down the garden, over the gravel and into the river, raked around, got some bits of wood for paddles and off we went, paddling it downstream. It was all going very well, drifting slowly along, when we noticed Brians dad running towards us, he was going quite quickly, shouting a lot and maybe more purple than he should have been and he didn’t stop when he got to the water – how were we meant to know it was a new van roof ……… and that was in the days when other people were allowed to kick your erse……….

It’s not much, and I do have a series of small things, but the fact that my VW Polo is covered in such delicately-scratched symbols as a heart, a smiley face, and the misspelled names of my youngest children is testament enough to their destructive power.

Do you have more details or a jpeg of the poster? I collect silkscreen gig posters and have quite a few contacts so you never know.. Its possible more are still out there..

At the top of the road where I grew up was a block of garages, there were some blackberry bushes and I/we decided to throw blackberries at the garage doors, I then decided to use the said blackberries to write the word sh*t on one of the doors. After one of the other kids in the road got told off by the owner, it didn’t take long for that telling off to find it’s way back to me.

A few years later I was bouncing a bit stone on a tennis racket and gave it a bit whoomp for the big stone to land on a parked cars windscreen and crack it, I think it was a Fiat Uno or Seat Ibiza. Got away with that one….

One of my children scratched my daughter’s name on one of my speakers a few years back.

Both denied it.

(Perhaps it was my wife)

I feel sorry for my kids. I’ve interviewed plenty of good liars over the years, and you do get better at it the more you do. The poor rascals in this house don’t stand a chance. It’s bordering on unsporting. 😀

Op ,that is harsh.
When I was 5/6 I covered my parents bedroom walls with lipstick .
My brother scribbled in black marker all over my blue!!, vinyl copy of The Crossing!

when I was about 10 for some reason or another I scratched a large spiral with a screw left over from the assembly of their brand new chest of drawers, I was not popular

when I was about 30 I was messing around trying to do an endo tailwhip thingy and managed to get my dmr v8 to smash teh rear light cluster on my dads week old mondeo

I had to pay for that one with real money

When I was a kid I liked the look of the Police houses down the street cos they were white.

Cue me attempting to paint our brick council house with white emulsion. Mum & Dad didn’t notice till it was dry. 😳

Great stuff maccruiskeen! 😀

Mine have had plenty of moments over the years, managed not to actually kill either of them yet so can’t be too bad.

Tyred jr (10) was mtb racing a couple of months ago up at Cathkin; after his race he and some of his mates were playing with a friend’s dog, chucking sticks for it, that sort of thing. Boy finds quite sizeable stick (probably better described as a bough) on the ground and gives it a mighty heave into the air, where it rises and falls in an arc onto the windscreen of the organiser’s van and smashes it. He’d won his race, but this gave the podium presentation a bit of an edge.

When I was about 12 or so, I decided to earn a bit of extra money by washing my dad’s fairly new car. He could never be arsed doing it himself and was happy to pay me a few quid to do it willingly, especially as he’d recently parked it somewhere where a load of birds had shat on it. Not sure what the birds had been eating, that stuff was solid and not for budging with a sponge and soapy water, so I found a stick and started chiselling it off. Worked well, so I did the whole car like that and destroyed the paintwork which only became evident after it had dried. Not popular.

Our youngest once came to find us looking really pleased. He wanted to show us the drawings he’d done.

He had covered ALL of a white ikea chair in really detailed heraldic symbols. To be fair they were very good for age and we found it funny

We had a static caravan in the lakes we’d go to every few weekends, back in the good old days of gas mantels and chemi-khazis. No electrical hook ups or other bizarre luxuries. He had a little black and white TV in it that ran off the battery in the car. So every evening someone had to go out and pop the bonnet and hook up the crocodile clips.

My dad had just taken delivery of a brand new, one of the first few off the production line, metallic denim blue mini metros. That evening it was delegated to me to go out and hook up the power.

Popped bonnet
Attached clips
Notice out of the corner of my eye movement in the caravan window
My dad is waving his arms and mouthing something that looks like ‘noooooooooo’
Decide I better hurry up and go inside and see what he wants
Slam bonnet
Four big pimples appear appear poking up through the metallic paint
I’d attached the clips handles standing bolt upright

Thanks cloudnine.. I’ve sent you an email

Many years ago whilst experimenting with matches and deodorant can I managed to scorch the top of the banisters. I did my best to conceal just how I had done this by sanding it down which at least reduced the amount of work my dad had to do to repair it.

Broke the whirligig clothes dryer by swinging on it.

Fed the dog the pods of the peas to conceal just how much of the pea patch we were snaffling. Fine till the dog cut out the middle man and just helped himself and ate the lot.

Dug a pair of trenches to play action man in the back garden.

Drove my dad car into a tree at high speed, writing it off and getting myself a week in hospital and 6 months on anti epileptic meds.