We used to call them sling arrows if it’s the same thing, length of straight thin wood-forsythia in my case, and propelled by a bit of string wrapped around the rear of the arrow and the other end round your hand. Making a guy for bonfire night, begging for cash outside the local shops and blowing the proceeds on bangers. Making a cannon out of old scaffold pipe and putting said bangers inside for extra BOOM!
Never get away with it now, any of it😢
So did we. It didn’t feel remotely powerful.
I never got to drive it as I was too young. So was my brother when he took it out for a joyride and parked it into a lamp post, writing both the car and lap post off so I never got to drive it.
My step father was an industrial chemist. I was pretty proficient with weedkiller, sugar and fertiliser by my mid teens. Which was also the time of the IRA Christmas bombing campaigns. Madness! I was once evacuated from a bus in Victoria bus station that was thought to have a bomb on it.
We lived in Essex at the time and would poke around in the old wartime airfields. Duton Hill had been ploughed up but you could find live ammunition in the soil.
Digging huge holes in my parents garden for no apparent reason.
Ah will I did it for reason. An underground den. It was my mate's garden though, my mum would have killed me.
I did help my dad service the car, which helped greatly when got my first one - a Hillman Imp.
Map reading. Did that from an early age, transcontinental journeys too. The love of maps has never left me.
If you could master the choke, and get a couple of cylinders popping then you might need to spray some random, magical fluid onto a part of the engine in the hope that a couple more cylinders might start popping.
Or in the case of my Fiesta which by now would be flooded, remove the air filter and prop open the choke butterfly with the screwdriver in the glovebox.
We always used a peg to keep the choke open on our Minis - the locking mechanism never seemed to work.
I was good at doing 360ºs on a skateboard - I could do 5+, or more than 1800º.
Last time I tried, after years of not putting my foot on a deck, I could still do four. I could manage an ollie 180º too.
Keepie uppie or kerby I used to easily reach 100 at keepie but then boredom set in
I’m so glad that I learned to drive cars that didn’t need double declutching!
Its nit difficult. I had a panda with gubbed syncromesh on third. Great car could push it up a small hill then jump start it down the other side all on my own.
Used a coin to wedge open the chevettes choke...them were the days! Apart from that - learning to ride a bike from my Dad, baking from my Nana and Mam, basic mechanicking from Dad and bro.
Taught myself ratios when mixing two stroke petrol for the old Lambretta/Vespa we used to pick up at 12 year old, not as accurate as 20:1 or 50:1 for today's Stihl saw just a guess if it looked right or get the girl at the petrol station to give us an extra glug from the dispenser to prevent seizure