Things you did or tried to do in your youth (that were a bit daft)

When I was about 15, I decided that I would train myself to be telekinetic. After an accumulative five hours or so of eye popping, gurning and getting bad headaches I gave up. That glass just wasn’t going to move.

I tried to launch a Bic pen into the mesosphere by sellotaping matches, with heads wrapped tightly in foil, around the end of it.
Suffice to say, it failed to gain the necessary rate of acceleration to overcome the earth’s gravitational pull…

It fell over and popped about a bit.

The innocence of youth eh?

Once my brother and I built a den. We found a very old pick-axe head, and, using some wire and rope, created tripwire activated trap that would swing down and smash the intruder in the face. It was quite a feat of engineering, but obviously incredibly dangerous. Fortunately no-one was hurt*.

*That we know of…

my rope swing failed, mind you tying it to a top of the outdoor stair banister probably explained why I ended up sitting on the kitchen table getting 3 unanethetised stitches in my forehead….

oh, another top tip, if the old fashioned mechanical mileometers that work by a peg attached to the spoke clicking them round make a comeback, if your’s isn’t quite clicking properly don’t try adjusting it by kicking it gently while you’re riding along …….

Tried to by some Ganga from some Rastas in Kilburn. We were about 14 and giving it large, loads of attitude and so down with the patois and came away with a great deal ………… of Italian herbs 😳

I volounteered to be the test pilot on a ‘deathslide’ we made from old washing line…I plumeted about 10 feet and landed on my ass.

A friend at uni did a similar thing and he walked funny, so I guess I came off lightly.

Although I am plagued by lower back pain 20 odd years later which is a little worrying.

Seem to remember I (we) spent a lot of time jumping off higher and higher walls and walking across those drainage pipes over the canal.

Also burning mates with magnifying glasses, seeing how close we could throw knives at each other whilst lying on the grass and mixing up lethal cocktails from Stuff We Found In The Shed

There was also a very steep hill near where I lived with a 90 degree right turn into a side street. We used to spend many a happy hour trying to make the corner on our bikes, showers of sparks from the pedals and lots of gravel rash.

Happy days

I wasn’t involved personally but a group of friends made a bomb at the age of 14 or so (30 odd years ago).
A harmless experiment that blew a 6″ diameter hole in a wall, gave the neighbours a bit of a fright and had the Police alerted, mobilised and on their best bollocking form. 😈

Oh god, the list is long….

Dropping the remains of a dead fox onto a car from a bridge is probably the worst. Christ knows what the driver must have thought.

Then the usual list of idiotic drunken going ons. Amazing to think I’ve made it

I tried to train myself to be able to breathe underwater (a la Man from Atlantis) by breathing through damp flannels in the bath.

It didn’t work.

Aged nine, a mate and I spent a whole afternoon building a suspension bridge between two large heaps of earth from some discarded builders detritus on the edge of a building site. This thing was easily thirty feet long and was made from old planks, plasterboard and bits of concrete.

We spent a happy few minutes underneath the bridge, before we decided to call it a day and toddle off home. Just as my mate got out from under it, the whole lot collapsed…hate to think what would have happened if he’d been ten seconds slower off the mark.

Balls – double post, please ignore.

Got drunk, bought a ticket from a mate, next day, still drunk, found myself in Yugoslavia with no idea why or where I was supposed to be. Luckily all the Brits on that flight were booked into the same hotel. Found my mates 24 hours later.

I organised a mass walkout from primary school at afternoon playtime. It is amazing how many kids followed me out. We all got in trouble and I wasnt singled out as the leader so It was OK

Tunneling was probably the most dangerous things we did (as in potential for death)up to the age of about 12 I would say. The area where I grew up has a lot of areas which are very sandy for quite a few feet below the surface, especially the fields where we played 90% of the time. I remember one Saturday evening we started to dig in to the face of one of the bays on our local brook. We actually got far enough in that my feet were probably 2 foot from the entrance. Parents were chuffed when they found us. During the first 10 or so years of my life I know that something like 4 children were killed digging in our general area and getting buried.

Compared to that regularly setting fire to parts of ourselves/each other with my mates dads model plane fuel was nothing!

Come to thnk about it. Maybe tiggy gatgun wasn’t such a bright idea….

My arse was constantly covered with 10p sized bruises!

The list of things I did would be rather long (and still be growing at an alarming rate!)

One of the highlights must have been the device I rigged up to stop cats going into the den I’d built at the bottom of the garden when I was 11:

For the “Cat Zapper” you will need:

1. long electrical extension cable
2. a sheet of metal approximately 2ft x 2ft (a flat baking tray will do)
3. some scissors and gaffer tape

cut off the socket end of the extension cable and separate the live and neutral wires so that they can be pulled a couple of feet apart, ensure you have exposed an inch of bare wire at the ends (you may wish to get an adult to help with the cutting, since scissors can be dangerous).

now gaffer tape the live wire to one side of your metal sheet and the neutral wire to the other side.

place the metal sheet in the doorway to your den. once you plug in the other end of the extension cable to your nearest power supply, the metal sheet will now be “electrified” and any cats standing on it will be zapped.

(do you think it worked? or do you think I blew the plug and socket in the garage and was shouted at by my mum?)

🙂

As a student one xmas we decided we needed an xmas tree, ended up going through loads of gardens before uprooting a 5ft conifer and dragging it back through the streets. Although I’m a bit ashamed of that sort of wanton vandalism we did kind of get our comeuppance – there had been a shooting somewhere close by at the time and armed police were out. A helicopter lit us up and it’s tannoy came on demanding we stand still with our hands visible, we did the natural (when drunk) thing and all tried to leg it. Fortunately we didn’t get shot although we did get cautions and spent the night in the cells 🙁

I experimented with metal kilt pins into plug sockets, had lighter fuel fires in a tin in my bedroom, dismantled and rebuilt fireworks, put asbestos sheets on bonfires, raided jcb’s for porn mags, placed poo on railway lines, my first road ride on a bicycle was directly into oncoming traffic on a main road, rode to school on a liberated C90 aged 14… all the usual stuff.

My brother and I (with our dads help), built a bogey. We decided to take it down our local hill – which is also a main road. I can achieve 45mph down this on the bike and at the bottom, it has a tight 90 degree right. We attempted this only once and luckily we never crashed. 🙄

Went sailing round the coast of the uk, using a A-Z road map to navigate.

We did not get that far..

😉

I noticed when I was kid if I stood on a short plank and pulled hard on one end that you could make that end leave the ground. I had a theory that all you needed to do to fly was then pull sufficiently hard on the other end. Alas my puny strength always seemed to thwart me from taking off.

I played back garden cricket one summer holiday with a plastic bat in a mate’s back garden. We didn’t have any tennis balls around, so we opted to play with stones instead.

Half an hour later, a very large and angry looking bloke appeared at the fence and we legged it…

Double fired doors in a long corridor tot he headmasters office [ 50 foot long?? perhaps more]
Trap air bomb forework in heavy fiore doors at roughl;y head height
Light fiorework, scarper

The Boom echoed so unbelievably effing loud that it really did sound like the school had been blown up – apparently the impact mark was rather fetching and off course the fire alarm went off

Do i need to say that it is dangerous to play with foireworks indoors?

Two guys took the hit for that offence leaving us to get away with it by simply being near them but not knowing what they were doing – the one who brought in the firework and the one who lit it got expelled

i had an intensely realistic dream that if my mum gave me green apple slices and i concentrated hard enough i could levitate. i had this dream several times and it was so real every time that i was unaware it was even a dream until i demanded more apple slices from mum and tried it in front of some friends…. i was about 6 or 7 at the time 😳

i’ll leave out the teenage stuff as all the examples are either illegal or life threatening.

*thought about posting then remembered my Mum could read this*

i had a quality youth, wish i wasn’t so much of a pussy now, thinking bout all the mad shit me n my mates got up to i must be invincible to have survived it to adulthood!

climbing then purposefully falling out of trees to see if we could stop ourselves on the way down
jumping off buildings- before parkour and free runing was cool 🙂
Numerous fires in my bedroom due to candles/ fireworks/ lighter fuel, my carpet was frigged
graffiti
bmx/ skatebords/ rollerblades- i used to backflip my blades like a boss
rope swings with copper wire/ electrical cord
over a couple of weeks i thieved a full PA system (speakers, amp, mics, numerous speaker and mic stands), from the church i went to sunday school at , not proud of that one 😳
my mate once made a small hydrogen bomb n set it off in the middle of a field, knocked him off his feet when he was stood 15 foot from it, he was daft though that lad. He’s the only one of us thats maried wi kids now, wierd.

Got told off by a dinner lady for doing something naughty one lunchtime at Infants school, so next day brought some matches to school and persuaded my best friend to set fire to the school as revenge for my ticking off. He managed to burn down a tree right next to it. Was arrested etc, parents summoned to school, but I denied everything and he took the rap (we were only 6 or 7) so he just got a severe bollocking from his parents.

Years later at secondary school I did save his life by showing our Physics teacher the heimlich maneuver when he was choking on a gob stopper. He’s gone bright pink and then passed out whist the teacher was slapping him on the back, at which point I popped up with ‘try this Sir’. So I think we’re quits now for the arson event.

Hmmm…. the list is long and some may still carry a custodial sentence so this is the tamest of the daftest:

Take a dozen of mate’s father’s discarded cigar tubes.
Visit a number of chemists for saltpeter, charcoal, sulphur (if you try to buy it all from one they sus you out pdq).
Grind, in correct measure, into a nice black powder.
Take some .22 ammunition, remove lead pellet.
Drill a hole into the convex end of the cigar tube.
Insert .22 case nad make sure it’s a snug fit.
Half fill the cigar tube with black powder and drop in a coin of internal dia size.
Drill a number of holes along the remaining tube.
Fill with black powder and crimp the end to create a small dia exhaust, with a small fuse trailing.
Take 3 ft of small bore plastic plumbing pipe.
Attach singlepoint sight to plastic tube.
Place tube on shoulder and line up sight with something valuable
Have mate slide a cigar tube into the pipe
Mate lights fuse
Cigar tube flies out of end of pipe and hits valuable object
Percussion cap ignites warhead with a satisfying boom!
Valuable object destroyed (poxy garden statue that was seemingly very expensive!)
Neighbours call police
Two 15 year olds spend a significant amount of time at local copshop being lectured by firearms officers with assorted threats of lifetime jail sentences through to firing squad. This was at the height of IRA activity in the UK. Was hard to gauge if they were really pissed off with us or quite impressed with out ingenuity. Parents were far less ambiguous.

Aged 15 having just finished o-levels I sat in the front of one of these with my feet hanging down by the front wheel

(probably similarly ropey)

whilst my mate guided it down here;

[/url]
Ditchling Beacon Road[/url] by Geoff Penn[/url], on Flickr

we seemed to get faster as we went down and when I commented at the bottom he said;

“Well, the brakes caught fire about 2/3rds of the way down so I had to stop using them. Oh, and the front tyre seems to be nearly flat.”

Neither of us thought it particularly unusual at the time although the faces of the car drivers coming up the hill looked a bit errm, ‘surprised and concerned’.

I think we were more bothered about walking home due to the flat tyre tbh.

Playing war with hairspray flamethrowers. Then frantically opening every window and trying to get the chlorine smell to go before mum got back from work.

Shooting air pistols/rifles at glass jars on top of the old guinea pig hutch. Had given all the guinea pigs away by then. Tin cans were boring. Was fun clearing all the glass shards from the veg patch though.

Teaching my younger brother how to make Dutch Arrows (you did make Dutch Arrows*, didn’t you?) was pretty stupid. Especially when it ended with him sticking the long pointed bit of a (unpopped) rivet right through his middle finger.
Could’ve been worse I guess.

*Dutch Arrow – as far as I remember: Take a straight stick about a foot long, attach feathers (hmm, I think maybe these were playing cards…) to one end and a screw/nail/rivet (my dad sold rivets, so these were ideal, pointed bit hammered into the shaft, rivet end stuck out as a tip) to the other.
You then take a long piece of string and wind this around your arrow. Somehow we could then fire these arrows, using the string like a catapult, many feet into the air. They would bloody fly! Then they would fall back to earth in a very exciting way, with the rivet end embedding itself deep into the ground.
Kids these days with their computer games, how boring must life be eh?

those dutch arrows went miles, we used to regularly manage to get them the length of a football pitch.

I’ve not shown my son how to build them what with personal injury litigation having moved on so far since the 1970’s

my mate once made a small hydrogen bomb n set it off in the middle of a field

Was your mate called Julius Oppenheimer by any chance?

Anyone else ever make zut zuts?
Plastic milk bottle crate hung from a tree. Set fire to plastic milk bottle crate. Eventually blobs of molten plastic will start to rain down going “ZUT! ZUT!” as they fall. Dare your mate to stick his hand under the falling zuts.

those dutch arrows went miles, we used to regularly manage to get them the length of a football pitch.

yeah! Brill weren’t they. Do you think they still make them in Holland?

Butter Bombs.

You will need;
A pat of butter liberated from the school kitchen
Some of those French bangers. Big one, preferably
A source of ignition, such as a lighter

Soften butter to a warm room temperature, while still in the paper.
Insert banger in to butter.
Light banger.
Slide butter bomb under the door of the traps as someone has just dropped trousers and sat on the throne.

Scarper.

Yay! – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_arrow

there’s a whole genre on YouTube of kids throwing sticks improbable distances.

Although they seem to have lots of names now, not just Dutch arrows.

Petrol bombs, death slides, abseiling, air rifles and breaking stuff were reoccuring themes for me.

There was also an incident with a dead dolphin, which I won’t go into.

there’s a whole genre on YouTube of kids throwing sticks improbable distances.

Did we miss out, not having a way to record our endeavours?