In my late teens/early twenties before grown-up thinking set in, I often enjoyed a harmless prank or a bit of mischievousness. Here’s a couple of examples.
One time a few of my friends and I went to a party. It was being held at a friend of a friend’s house (so hardly anyone we knew), which was quite a big house with a longish drive that most of the guest’s cars were parked on. For reasons that are now lost in the mists of time, someone in our group ended up being insulted at the party, so my friends and I decided to leave and hit a club. On the way out we spotted the property was having some building work done near the drive entrance. Conveniently there was a largish stack of bricks quite close to said entrance. So after removing our own cars, we made a human chain and started passing bricks along it whilst two people at the end started building a dry brick wall (ie gravity only). In about 30 mins we’d made something approx 1m high that spanned the whole drive entrance. Sadly we didn’t stick around to see the fireworks at turning out time, but I suspect there were some choice words.
I used to carry a full socket set in the boot of my car…before I realised the cost in petrol over the years. One Saturday afternoon I parked in the car park of a DIY store near the centre of Norwich whilst visiting a friend’s flat. This was before the days of CCTV cameras and automatic parking fines for exceeding time limits. The afternoon turned into an evening of pubbing and clubbing and around 2.30am I finally returned to my car. As I walked towards it I spotted the car park entrance now had a reasonably chunky barrier across it (Karma for the above maybe). On my car was a note saying I would not be able to remove it until Monday morning. Remembering my socket set, I set about dismantling part of the barrier, removing the main cross bar and then driving my car out. I then reassembled the barrier and wrote: ‘Poof! Love Houdini’ on the back of the note and posted it through the DIY store letterbox.
When i was at primary school I was removed from class with one of my friends for carrying on.
There was a games hall in the middle with all the classrooms around it and we were told to stand one at each end.
There were light switches at each end and we started switching the lights on and off.
After about half an hour they stopped working and there was a burning smell.
The fire alarm went off and the school was evacuated.
Fire brigade came and said the wiring in the loft above the games hall was so old it had melted and started to smoulder.
Needless to say they never found out what we’d been doing with the lights…
In London during the late 60s early 70s anyone of almost any age could buy fireworks, especially bangers which were big!
Although this was dangerous we would all donate several bangers and put all the gunpowder into a large pile with an ignition trail and when lit there was a blinding flash and a proper mini mushroom cloud, a real Whoah moment, but things sometimes got out of hand like when one mate put a banger in some dog poo without telling us and we all went home and had to explain why we had poo on our school uniform.
I used to go early morning fishing in the school holidays with my mates, on the local rivers.
We’d cycle through the local villages loaded with fishing boxes and rods slung on our backs, dressed in tee shirts, jeans and wellies.
It was usually way before 6.00am when we cycled the 5 or so miles to get there. One morning we spotted an apple tree, and decided to obtain a few for the hard day ahead.
No one around at that time of the morning, so the three of us climbed the tree in all our gear and started the acquisition of apples which was obviously, rightly ours!
Imagine our surprise on that summers morning, when the curtains were quickly opened, for us to see some bloke dressed in his birthday suit, who was obviously just up to start his early shift somewhere, staring, pointing and shouting at us halfway up his tree.
We stared back and then shinned down laughing and legged it to our waiting bikes.
He never did chase us and he most likely went bonkers when he went to look at his tree.
We had taken a bite out of most of the apples we couldn’t carry, while still leaving them on his tree…
The in-laws had an old, really old, Black and White TV, with the early type of tube that lacked a laminated front safety glass. It was very dim so I put a new 17" tube in it (now a laminated one because I valued the safety of the in-laws).
Problem, what does one do with an extremely fragile old TV tube? No way was I going to risk it in the back of my car all the way back to London.
M-I-L had a bright idea. Put it in the ash bin with the most recent grate sweepings, being collected tomorrow morning. I went one better and carefully put a sharply pointed stone central under the screen resting on it, knowing how the bin men liked to wake up the whole street the way they banged the galvanized bins and lids (a bone of contention with M-I-L).
Sure enough next morning at about 6.30 there was a loud implosion as the tube shrank into a small pile of glass chips hiding in the ashes. Of course the bin lid did not fly off as one might have expected from as loud an explosion, and the bin men were somewhat puzzled when they looked into a three-quarters empty bin.
It gave four wide-awake adults lying in their beds a childish sense of glee. Apparently for the next few months, each time she switched on the TV with its fresh bright picture, M-I-L not help herself but chuckle.
Apparently my dad used to put dog poo inside a paper bag and set light to it outside someone’s front door before knocking on it. The house owner would open the door, see the fire and stamp on the bag to put it out.
so i used to live in a shared house with 2 other guys around my age (17)
none of the bedroom doors had locks on and i used to sleep very late and with my mouth open!
so one morning Glynn decided to wake me up by pouring a full bottle of clove oil into my mouth,
But before he did it he turned off the water to the flat!!!
i woke up FAST
my eyes snapped open, i sat bolt upright and then ran to the kitchen sink, only to find no water! so i then ran down the street to a nearby corner shop that had a toilet out back in a little courtyard and spent the next half hour washing my mouth out!
Made bombs out of “very basic” household ingredients still available in the 60’s from hardware shops.
Cannot recall where “my friends” got the “recipe” from but anyway…6 old Ostermilk tins with appropriate long fuses blew the living B-Jebus out a disused railway tunnel under a main road in the Jordanhill Glasgow post code. Icing sugar and weedkiller were, as I recall 2 base ingredients but I’m not going to post the rest of them here.
Fortunately we were all ln the Senior School Harriers and we ran like the wind into a local Cafe and watched the Police & Fire Service arrive. To the Wurlitzer tunes of the Kinks & Beatles.
There was no structural damage apparently.
I was really an innocent bystander led astray.
Must admit I did not sleep too well for a couple of nights…
Apart from that, my elder brother was a pig to live with…nasty piece of work and bullied my elder sister to oblivion. So, the night he was leaving home to go on a School sponsored cruise to the Holy Land for two weeks, I grated a substantial amount of laxative chocolate into his bed time Oveltine we always got.
He never made it. Nor did my parents figure it. I think they got the money back though.
He did not know for decades until he got up my nose big time at a family social event.
Thought he was going to have a very dodgy “event” given by this time had a bad heart.
My Mother’s face was a study.
A long time ago in the days before CCTV I used to own a Davrian Mk2. The car was so low I was regularly able to drive under the barriers at multistory car parks without paying (I was a hard up student!). Normally any cars behind me did not bat an eyelid but on one occasion the car behind me starting blasting his horn at me as I departed underneath the barrier. Probably envy!
Again back in London in the very early 70s, I had a mate who collected the free toys that used to be in cereal boxes, and unlike some of us he always had loads of pocket money, and one baking hot summers day he bought a box of honey coated Sugar Puffs just for the toy, and as we wandered along the road there was a builder mixing up cement in a basement area, he had no top on and was sweating heavily mixing the cement, so my mate leaned over the railings and poured the whole box of sugar puffs over him.
The sticky sugar puffs not only went into his cement mix but stuck to his sweaty back, head and hair, he looked like he had some terrible skin disorder , he shouted up " you F****** B******* and run up the stairs ,and we in turn shot off down the road laughing.
At a works Christmas Meal on the last day of the working year, one of the blokes on our table was seen putting the tables Christmas Crackers into his bag.
As a bunch of hardline engineers, we decided to let him think he’d got away with it. When he went to collect his meal, I opened his bag, pulled them all and zipped his bag back up.
Much laughter ensued and we all finished our meals without him knowing a thing and went on our way for the Christmas holidays.
First day back at work in January, I got the evil eye, a round of effs and was accused of being the culprit. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t get the joke.
Apparently, he’d taken them to give to his young nephews, due to his brothers marriage breaking down and him also losing his job.
When he knocked on his brothers door, his nephews jumped around excitedly and asked what Uncle Stuart had brought them.
After opening his bag, he said he shook his head in dismay and told them “A bag of pulled crackers lads…”
When I was a kid we used to put penny rockets into airfix model jets and ‘fly’ them up the street. Mine went really well, right through the corner shop window
Back in the day (smoking at work!) one could buy cigarettes and Hamlet cigars from the cashier at the end of the canteen servery. Big tubs of both sugars also lurked just at the end of the counter by the spoons etc
One eccentric bare-footed colleague in particular bought a pack of Hamlet every morning to go with his big personal mug of thick black coffee liberally decorated with two dessert-spoons of demerara sugar.
One day, the cigars weren’t on view, and fresh stock was awkward to dig out so both he and cashier were heads forward looking under the counter.
The mischief-maker immediately behind him added several more heaped spoonfuls of demerara, so much the peak was only just sinking from sight when the searchers found their treasure and straightened up.
The rest of us in the queue behind were close to wetting ourselves trying to keep a straight face, and the counter staff were not much better.
We all sat down to enjoy our tea, discuss last night’s TV, and watch the sweet coffee. He stirred it five or six times, as usual, and in between anecdotes drank it as slowly, as usual, all of it, as usual.
A fortnight later I asked him why he drank so much black coffee.
“I can’t taste much after smoking these coffin nails, so only strongest blackest black will do.”
And why so much sugar.
“I add it until I can’t taste the difference. Two or three spoons of sand is about right for most coffee.”
Fifty years later I still don’t know if he noticed what they did, and I never gave the game away. But for several weeks following people smiled when they noticed him adding his ‘sand’.
Around bonfire night in the 1960s and early 1970s it was very easy to buy fireworks, almost every corner shop sold them in the weeks leading up to “Bonfire night”.
Our local group of lads got into making hand held “rocket launchers” out of old cardboard tubes. Firework rockets back then weren’t very interesting but bangers were much more powerful. We used to sellotape a banger (or sometimes two) to a rocket so the fuses were together and launch them at targets…such as each other’s gardens. The rocket would take the banger to its target. Great fun…but pretty stupid.
A few days before Nov 5th a lad further up our road launched one at us. I saw it coming, heard the bang and saw the remains land almost at my feet. It was impressive, a double banger on a slightly bigger rocket than usual. I picked up the spent remains, snapped off the wooden stick and was about to throw them in the dustbin when I saw my father come home from work. Now he was pretty strict and I didn’t want to let him see what I had, so I hid them behind my back. He always wanted to talk so I followed him indoors. He always brought home an evening newspaper and his favourite reading place on a cold night was crouched down with his back to the coal fire, with the paper spread out on the carpet.
As he chatted to me, he did just that. For some inexplicable reason I absent-mindedly threw the remains of the firework on the fire behind his back. A few seconds later there was a loud bang and the coal fire exploded, sending hot coals up his back and out onto the newspaper. One of the two bangers hadn’t actually gone off until then!
My father leaped up like a shot kangaroo, almost hitting the opposite wall. His newspaper caught fire in a couple of places. I won’t repeat what he said. I stamped the flames out and then ran for it. I was good at running….
It was an accident but till his dying day my father never believed that.
my proudest moment in primary school…me and friends go into a field with my bow ( a proper one, not a toy one ). Fire arrows straight up in the air (they disappear out of sight) and wait to see where they land.
