1. After a little accident at 17, can't stand gin anymore;
2. Was once a DJ, playing German cosmic music;
3. Snapped a piston rod on the M25, which then catapulted backwards, missing everyone;
4. Can't speak on the telephone for more than a few minutes;
5. Uses sidestroke when escaping by water;
6. Shoes did not melt in minus 37 degrees as they did in plus 52.
Illustrations above and below by J.H. Wingfield5 Once, many years ago, in anticipation of the children we would one day have, a relative of my wife's gave us a box of Ladybird books from the 1950s and 60s.
6 They all had titles like "Out in the Sun" and "Sunny Days at the Seaside" and contained meticulously drafted, richly coloured illustrations of a prosperous, contented, litter-free Britain in which the sun always shone, shopkeepers smiled and children in freshly-pressed clothes derived happiness and pleasure from innocent pastimes - riding a bus to the shops, floating a model boat on park pond, chatting to a kindly policeman.
7 My favourite book was called "Adventure on the Island".
8 There was, in fact, precious little adventure in the book - the highpoint, I recall, was finding a starfish suckered to a rock but I loved it because of the illustrations [by the gifted and much missed J.H. Wingfield] which portrayed an island of rocky coves and long views that was recognizably British but with a Mediterranean climate and a tidy absence of pay-and-display car parks, bingo parlours and the tackier sort of amusement arcades.
Laboratory Bunsen BurnerThe Coodabeen Champions made these immortal words their theme: "You're only young once, but anyone can be immature," and that's the theme of this post - a meme with a difference.
Anyone who reads this is automatically tagged and is duty bound to post his or her greatest act of immaturity, at any stage of the aging process. Then don't bother tagging anyone else.
Here's one of my better ones:
In my late schooldays, we did Chem in a huge, cold, red/brown painted concrete mausoleum of a lab with parallel benches, with large, admittedly quite light windows which opened outwards. The Chem teacher's name was Bunter [as in Billy - see below].
Now we had rows of these bunsen burners [see pic top left] and it was the job of two boys to have them lit when the lesson started. I don't know who first suggested it but we saw their immediate possibilities if we attached the rubber tubes to the water nozzles but now we had a problem.
What to call these new devices.
We decided on "Bunter Burners" and so every single one of them was attached to the tap and the tap turned on. My, it was a wondrous cascade of fountains except that things went a little awry when the small, white, rectangular sinks began to overflow onto the floor and we feared the water would run out the door and down to the Principal's office.
We needn't have worried. Now a party of four persons, one bright lad pointed out that in fact there was a step of six inches at every door, obviously designed for such situations as this and so we rested easy, observing, in true scientific fashion, the rising of the floodwaters. Somebody may have mentioned Winnie the Pooh and his umbrella at this stage - I can't remember.
It was now felt best to switch the taps off and escape through the windows. We never did have that Chem lesson for two days.
Bill Bryson, in this excerpt from Neither Here nor There, Black Swan, 1998, pp 98/99, recalls his area of expertise:
I had no gift for woodwork. Everyone else in the class was building things like cedar chests and ocean-going boats and getting to play with dangerous and noisy power tools, but I had to sit at the Basics Table with Tubby Tucker and a kid who was so stupid that I don't think we ever learned his name. We just called him Drooler.
The three of us weren't allowed anything more dangerous than sandpaper and Elmer's Glue, so we would sit week after week making little nothings out of offcuts, except for Drooler who would just eat the glue.
Mr Dreck never missed a chance to humiliate me. The class roared. Tubby Tucker laughed so hard that he almost choked.
He laughed for twenty minutes, even when I whispered to him across the table that if he didn't stop it, I'd bevel his testicles.
Via Tiberius Gracchus, originally from Nich Starling or the Thunderdragon, not sure who. Thanks for nothing, lads:Not coming clean on this one because it will give away my age, which I assure you is between 23 and 73. So have to think of a political memory.
Better not mention the Night of the Long Knives, the Cuban Missile Crisis or Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood Speech, nor the Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum re-run on the Triple Underpass at
So, apart from Mark Felt Lovelace, the one who always intrigued me was the arch hp-hp-hp military nutter G. Gordon Liddy. There was a possibly apocryphal story [surprisingly not denied over here] that Liddy was once talking to his opposite number among the Russkies [or was it the Chinese?] and it was a vital meeting in that both sides were trying to show how hard they were.
Liddy lit a candle or a cigarette lighter, whatever and proceeded to hold his hand over the flame, letting the flesh burn. The Russkie is supposed to have gone away convinced that the Americans were total nutters. Thanks, Gordon.
I lived through the Winter of Discontent of 1979 and clearly remember Stand Down Margaret in 1990 and was over in
I hereby tag Mutley the Dog, Ordovicius, Pub Philosopher, Stan and Steve Green. If any of these have already been tagged, consider yourselves double-tagged, chaps.
