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Daft things you did when you were young

round said:
The list is endless ,I was always up to something but for some reason I got to thinking about when I was at a mates house. I had a Gat pistol with a cork in the end ( ran out of pellets )and was whacking flies. He asked me for a go and went up to the living room window and shot at a fly not knowing the end came out and it went through the window. I can still hear the walloping he got now 60 years on.
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I took my newly acquired Meteor down to a local pond and decided to harass a group of whirligigs that were swimming about in the middle, on my first shot i dropped a few inches short and heard a shout on the far bank where a mate was fishing, I thought he was taking the mick and went round to show him my new gun. It seems the ricochet had carried across and hit him in the goolies. that was my first and last trip to the pond with my gun :D
 
I remember, probably ‘62, my mate found a live 7.62 blank at the Cardiff Tattoo and brought it home. After much deliberation and, as 10 year olds, not realising the significance of the chamber, we decided to “set it off”. Quite why I volunteered I don’t know right to this day.

We jammed a suitable spanner into a pile of paving slabs outside his Dad’s garage, shoved the blank nose down into it, all ready to go. I used a pair of pliers to hold a nail and a hammer…

What a bang!

My mates were all open mouthed, I was stunned, my mate’s mum came haring out of the house demanding to know what had happened- “Oh, it was just a cap we let off”.

We found one, tiny, piece of brass, how I didn’t collect a reasonable sample embedded firmly in my body I have even less idea than why I did it in the first place! I do wonder if that is when my tinnitus started given I don’t remember not having it.

That was, I think, hands down my daftest, but there are others that still cause my blood to run cold.
 
Just remembered this one!
Me and my mates had action men, I had the Red Devil one with the parachute.
At one end of our Council estate there was a four storey block of flats. On the roof was a tank room which you could access via a ladder on the top floor landing.
We used to climb up and play on the roof! NB: This was very much pre H&S, so no guard rails round the roof edge!
We would throw the action man and his parachute off the roof many times, and his parachute did actually work quite well. But thinking back now we could have had a serious accident, possibly even fatal, if we fell off that roof?
But at the time we thought nothing of it....
 
Around Bonfire Night and the few days before, we, me and my mates, would "scrounge" as much wood as we could for the estate bonfire, which was pretty much organised and arranged by all the kids on the estate. We'd look in old bombsites, skips, in the alleyways behind shops, etc, anywhere really.
We would usually collect quite a stash, and hide it behind the block of garages at the edge of the estate until bonfire night. We hid it as other kids from other estates, would often steal someone else's stash if found....of course we never, ever did that, honest...
We would also "collect" as many roadside traffic lights, eg: the old oil filled ones that they would put out for roadworks, etc.
So we had wood and we had fuel, what could go wrong?
The last bonfire I remember having got a bit out of hand, we would pile the wood in a small concrete pen on the estate, it was an unused recreational area, for football etc. But on this occasion it got so big and so hot that it started to break up the concrete slab on the ground and the flames were getting higher and higher, until the fire brigade turned up..... someone had obviously reported us.....end of bonfire!
 
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@pjgtech Yep,they have a lot to answer for (y)
:ROFLMAO:
 

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pjgtech said:
Around Bonfire Night and the few days before, we, me and my mates, would "scrounge" as much wood as we could for the estate bonfire, which was pretty much organised and arranged by all the kids on the estate. We'd look in old bombsites, skips, in the alleyways behind shops, etc, anywhere really.
We would usually collect quite a stash, and hide it behind the block of garages at the edge of the estate until bonfire night. We hid it as other kids from other estates, would often steal someone else's stash if found....of course we never, ever did that, honest...
We would also "collect" as many roadside traffic lights, eg: the old oil filled ones that they would put out for roadworks, etc.
So we had wood and we had fuel, what could go wrong?
The last bonfire I remember having got a bit out of hand, we would pile the wood in a small concrete pen on the estate, it was an unused recreational area, for football etc. But on this occasion it got so big and so hot that it started to break up the concrete slab on the ground and the flames were getting higher and higher, until the fire brigade turned up..... someone had obviously reported us.....end of bonfire!
Click to expand...
I remember this too in the late 80s on our estate, however it wasn't just wood. Thinking back on it, the locals must've known stuff would disappear and deposit bulky waste outside in the first days of November. Ours was old sofas, beds and god knows what. Being the era just before wheelie bins, I remember us whole streets bins and adding on numerous bags of rubbish.

On good years the bonfire got pretty big, well into 2nd storey height. The risks to it weren't materials theft but some gits burning it down early.

My brother was actually one of the main reasons it stopped happening there. When the fire had burned down to a big bed of embers with just the odd patch of flames remaining here and there, the bigger lads started a game of jumping over it. Consisting as described above, those embers also included all sorts of metal mattress springs & framework etc. He tripped and 'thankfully' put his palms out to catch himself, so he 'only' melted his palms when it could've been so much worse.
He was in the children's burns unit for a couple of weeks having treatments to pop blisters, remove chunks of ash and stop his hands from permanently balling up into loose fists. Another lad his age had been messing around with petrol and had gone up like a human torch, he was on a special water bed thing. There were a few little kids & even toddlers with horrible burns & injuries from errant fireworks.

In a way I missed those rare nights of feral freedom when we'd have the excuse to play with a big fire without getting in trouble, but seeing up close the potential of what could happen made our alternative Nov 5th cinema outings thereafter a fair substitution.

It didn't quite cure the pyromaniac in me, but reigned it in a lot. Who doesn't appreciate the spectacular combustion of a gorse patch?!
 
One day in cubs one of them gave me a 7.62 round he found
I was dropping it on the floor and throwing it around,not realising it was a live round at my age then.
My dad confiscated it,gave it to the copper who lived over the road,who confirmed it was live.
The bugger never gave it back to me to play with :ROFLMAO:
 
Craftysod said:
One day in cubs one of them gave me a 7.62 round he found
I was dropping it on the floor and throwing it around,not realising it was a live round at my age then.
My dad confiscated it,gave it to the copper who lived over the road,who confirmed it was live.
The bugger never gave it back to me to play with :ROFLMAO:
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Probably kept it for the Bren Gun hidden under his stairs !
 
At boarding school when I went the prefects used to play a game involving darts and turning the lights off, every one hiding. This was carried out in their common room. A version of Russian roulette.
It had stop by the time I got to the top of the school.
Putting bangers in milk bottles with a suitable stick in the top.
 
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