Does she still love it?

Originally Posted by spaz

Most of my mothers family are farmers, this led to me having some cracking holidays as a kid when I became too much of a pain in the arse at home. I remember watching with interest as my uncle sprayed the farm's markings onto the new born lambs and where he put the can afterwards.

Now I'm not sure but I believe I must have been watching one of the WWII classics before my visit. What I am positive about is that he wasn't best pleased later that day when he drove past the field and noticed his sheep were now adorned with big fuck off blue swastikas on their sides. If my memory serves me correctly, that particular visit was cut short for some reason.

Absolutely brilliant! That's right up there with some of the 'Fight Club' stunts. 'Fertilising' your lawn with used motor oil, bird feed all over the Mercedes forecourt...

Originally Posted by JesterRIP

Originally Posted by spaz

Most of my mothers family are farmers, this led to me having some cracking holidays as a kid when I became too much of a pain in the arse at home. I remember watching with interest as my uncle sprayed the farm's markings onto the new born lambs and where he put the can afterwards.

Now I'm not sure but I believe I must have been watching one of the WWII classics before my visit. What I am positive about is that he wasn't best pleased later that day when he drove past the field and noticed his sheep were now adorned with big fuck off blue swastikas on their sides. If my memory serves me correctly, that particular visit was cut short for some reason.

Absolutely brilliant! That's right up there with some of the 'Fight Club' stunts. 'Fertilising' your lawn with used motor oil, bird feed all over the Mercedes forecourt...

Yeah I'm always a little bemused as to why these people still talk to me. :D

Speaking of farm animals and paint...

School trip paintballing many years ago (who'd let 14 year olds paintball!?). Next to one particular area, there was a farmer's field with cows in. Probably would have left them alone had it not been for a sign saying 'do not shoot the cows'.

Cue a field full of yellow and orange cows.

Little did I know that a mere discression as a child would lead to the downfall of a nations high street favorite.

As a 11 year old lad I was well into fishing. Nothing too serious jus the odd Saturday down the local gravel pit. This particular weekend I needed to replenish my meagre collection of fishing tackle with some hooks. As I entered the wide-eyed emporium of Woolworths in search of said hooks I realised that I also needed some weights to accompany them. I didn't have enough pocket money for both.

Do I get one or the other legally or pinch one and pay for the other. Doing a store detective recce (even in those days I was switched on) I decided for the latter. Secreted the weights into my pocket and paid for my hooks at the check out.

Years passed and was still nervous about entering Wollies in case some archaic footage of theft was still knocking about.

On the collapse of the store I was blaming myself for the destruction of the nations favourite and nearly attempted to send a cheque for £1 to cover the cost. Thankfully Chief of Domestic staff called me a silly cunt and stopped me in my tracks.

Not on par with Ronnie Biggs and the great train robbery I know.

Originally Posted by spaz

Yeah I'm always a little bemused as to why these people still talk to me. :D

Did he eventually do that crazy thing that people do when they've had enough and absolutely cannot take any more and go crazy windmill at anyone and anything? And it's not normally in response to something horrible like more abuse, but something bizarrely innocent like your mum asking him if he'd made his bed...

One from me - There was this family-run pub down the road (picture: Welsh mining village, lost in the 60's - expect Nick Berry to come riding through in police motorcycle at any moment). It was home to the regular dirty faced old men, all 'snuffing' themselves and occasionally hacking up a brown blob into a hanky, sat in their quiet corners quaffing either Brains or cloudy cider with their border collies spread out all over the teracotta floor tiles by the coal fire, knackered and half soaked from their 'walk' in the pissing weather.

This pub was home to a Great Dane (a previous post suddenly activated my long-term memory :D ) who was at best, a scarey guard dog who would watch you walk by nervously - but at worst liked nothing more than to give chase and get horny. The rugby pitch was just up the hill behind the pub, and whenever they had a match on, someone would nearly always have to call someone from the pub to come and get the dog as it went from trying to hump one player to the next.

So one weekend I'm up there with my younger brother and our two cousins and I was probably about 14, which would have made him 8. Whilst we were having a mess about on the rugby pitch practising some passes and kicks etc this dog turned up and at first, sat there watching us. Initially, I thought about suggesting going somewhere else (i.e. the fields behind our back garden) but then it hit me......

I told my brother that I've seen the dog like this before, and he sits there getting more and more crazy - and that the best thing to do is to all run away while we still can and as fast as we can. All three of them took off straight away whilst I stood there and watch the huge dog go bombing after them and over the hill at the back. After I'd lost sight of them, all of a few seconds later all I could hear was the petrified screams of my brother coupled with fits of laughter from my two cousins.

By the time I finally caught up with them, my brother was trying to leopard-crawl his way out of the big-dog's grip, but each time he struggled the dog just got more aggressive.

In the end we just had to sit and wait for the 'big guy' to knacker himself out. But even then, every time my brother tried to get up, he would get growled at and 'dry-humped' again.

This went on for a full half-hour, by which time my brother had been suitably traumatised for life.

I loved my Action Man (not that kind of love [not that kind of Action Man you fukcing pervs.]). I had Action Man with Eagle eyes, Action Man with simulated hair and beard, I had naked Action Man that came in a box when you collected enough stars (strange that he did not come with "roll mats"). Loads of uniforms, donkey Walloper, Bonehead, Para, Woodentop, Jock, Diver etc. ad nausem. Had the Willy's Jeep with searchlight and sundry other accesories. Never had the Scimitar though. But, I did have an indulgent mother. She spent hours making me an Action Man tank out of cardboard boxes a' la Blue Peter. I must say it was bril'.

One week later, mother round at grandmother's, a few doors down, little A_D on the living room floor playing Western desert or some such, decides that a little realism is needed because the tank just got brewed up.

It was a crap house anyway, and what parent leaves the matches in plain view, and I am quite confident the fire brigade had nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon......


Edited to add: The next Christmas I got my first air gun, I said she was indulgent, not smart....

There was a kid who lived down the road from me when I was growing up, he was a year younger than me and his name was Lewis and he had long foppish hair and big teeth. I didn't like him.

Now young Lewis took quite a shine to me and the other kids on the street, he would try to join in with our games of soldiers and even let us play on his new bike which had gears! His parents were relatively rich you see and they could afford things like that, which enhanced my hatred of him.

Anyway Lewis really was quite annoying with the way he used to try and play with us and the constant way he used to try and be friends, he even had the audacity to invite me to his birthday party once.

Anyway one Autumn we rigged up a rope swing across a small stream in the woods which were at the end of the road. Lewis's parents wouldn't let him go in the woods because they thought it was dangerous, so Lewis never got to experience the swing. We would constantly taunt him about how brilliant the swing was and sneak through the break in the fence to get into the woods as Lewis watched in envy.

One day Lewis could take no more and he decided to follow us into the woods, breaking his parents strict rules. realising he was coming with us, I snuck ahead to 'prepare' the swing. I hooked the rope over a very weak branch and waited for Lewis and the other kids to arrive.

As Lewis looked on at the magical swing, you could see the excitement starting to grow on his face, finally he would experience the swing for himself and be one of the gang. As he stepped up to the swing I gave him a few pointers, explaining that it was very important to jump out as far as possible in order to gain enough momentum in order to swing back to the bank.

He took a flying run at the rope and grabbed onto it in mid air, as the rope tightened around the small twig I had hooked it over, the twig snapped and the rope fell about two feet, jerking violently as it reached the end of it's travel. This dislodged poor Lewis from the swing and he fell awkwardly into to freezing cold, muddy stream, hurting his arm in the process. He started to cry and he was covered in mud so I did the decent thing and went home for my tea, leaving him to swim out by himself.

For some reason he didn't want to be in the gang after that.

Somewhere in darkest rural Berkshire, near Inkpen, is a field. In the field is a feck-off big hole. Where a 300 year old tree used to grow...until one day in 1977 or 78, my friends and I blew it out of the ground. With a diesel/weed-killer combination of our own devising.

The blast was huge, the crater ditto and the fuss occasioned was also very big. Because unbeknownst to us, TVP had recently received intelligence that an IRA explosives cache was somewhere in...Berkshire! It actually turned out to be in Pangbourne I think - which is a wee bit further away but we spent 2 to 3 hours putting our CCF fieldcraft into action, as we E&Ed through the police cordon. Thank feck they didn't have a helicopter in those days or we would have been in big-big-trouble.

Alas the two lads i was out with that day are no longer with us. Chris and Mark...top boys if al ittle heavy handed on the measuring!

Originally Posted by spaz

It must have been pretty shit to be my little brother. He can't be that badly psychologically scarred though as he still talks to me occasionally.

I was chuffed to bits when he arrived but he bored the shit out of me for the first couple of years, but once he was up and about walking and talking I had a dogsbody, accomplice and guinea pig all rolled into one.

By the time he was 3 or 4 I'd told him Father Christmas didn't exist and there was no Tooth Fairy or Easter Rabbit. Harsh you may say but he was going to need this mental conditioning to survive the rest of his childhood.

How he isn't blind I have no idea, as I can't remember how many times he was made to stand in the garden with an apple on his head as I tried to knock it off with a rubber sucker arrow.



As I got older my imagination became more warped and the lethality of my toys increased. I put him in a dossbag and dropped it down the wooden staircase to see what would happen.

Thump thump thump thump thump thump BANG sob cry wail. If anyone's curious.

I once took him down to the canal to test if the ice was thick enough for me to walk on, I accurately gauged that it wasn't as he crashed through the surface after about three steps.

His problems really started when some mug gave me an air pistol for Christmas. I shot him in the arse with one of the darts at near point blank range. He screamed and screamed I realised he wasn't going to shut up unless I acted quickly. What would SSgt Barnes from Platoon have done? That's right grip the front of his T-shirt with both hands and hiss through gritted teeth "Take the pain" until he stopped crying. I put in the best performance of a war ravaged late 60s US soldier ever attempted by a 10yr old Welsh boy, even if I do say so myself.

I managed to shut him up and kept the pistol, unluckily for him. Next I decided to try my hand at manufacturing body armour. It can't be that hard I thought and in 10 minutes I had him nicely wrapped up in several layers of bubblewrap.

I detected fear as I looked down the pistol's crude sight, beads formed on his brow as he stood stock still 5 metres to my front. Conscious that I needed to make this a well aimed shot in order for the armour to spare him injury, I carefully aimed at the centre of his body mass and gently squeezed the trigger.

BANG!

My aim was true but something had gone wrong!

My brother was lying on the floor screaming, somehow the pellet had torn straight through the protective layers of bubblewrap and into his soft 6 year old flesh.

Oops!

I don't recall shooting him again after that (well apart from the time I shot him in the leg as he rode past, on his bike causing him to fall off, but he had provoked me by gobbing off) so he didn't have it all bad. I do remember being caught by Mother in the garden having tied him to a washing line pole. I was in the process of covering his bare feet in jam when caught and was intending to see what the wasps and ants would make of him.

I think he breathed a sigh of relief when I left home.

F..K me, your surname isn't venables is it? Psychopath would appear to be apt in your case!

The worst I can remember doing was climbing over the wall of a pub's yard & relieving them of bottles of sweet cider when I was about 14. Bonfire night was good, our gang used to fashion rocket launchers out of bits of tubing, put on big leather mitts and goggles then wander round launching rockets at other gangs, that and knocking on pensioners doors and when we heard them coming dropping a banger through the letter box! An incident like that with the local "flea pit" cinema got one of my mates 18 months in Borstal for "arson"!
We had been kicked out of the cinema for re-enacting a cowboy fight scene in the aisle's. There were 5 of us all about 15 and p..sed off at missing the rest of the film. We tied a handful of bangers & jumping jacks together & tossed up to see who would drop them through the letter box, not realising it dropped straight on to the managers desk, which was covered in papers! The resulting fire gutted the office, caused the cinema to be evacuated and my mate "Johnny" who had won the "honour" of revenge, to be arrested, he had been spotted by an adult who knew him as he did the deed! There but for the grace of god goes me!