10 Things Redux

Mr John Tinney has namedropped me in the neverending tide of ’10 Things’ that has been going on for … effectively forever as far as anyone under the age of forty is concerned

His own entry in the competition to be the person least likely to be left in sole charge of anyone’s kids (including his own) is pretty funny and … I’m sure you’ll all be shocked to learn … sets a bad example to others.

As a result, although I’ve already done this, I am … as you’ll all doubtless be entirely unsurprised to learn … inclined to do it again.

My excuse is that the first one was done specifically in response to a left-handed challenge by SouthPawPoet and not, therefore, a canonical list, so much as a rebuttal … and I am, therefore, entitled to respond to John as though for the first time.

The real reason is, of course, that I’m the kind of kid your parents warned you not to play with and easily convinced ¹ that something being a bad idea doesn’t mean it won’t still be fun — and I‘m nothing if not up for a bit of fun ².

So … just for fun, as they say …

10 Things Probably Nobody Should Know About Me

1. When my sister was a baby, still sitting in a sitting-chair and eating purée with a plastic bib, like a tray, around her neck … before she could even speak … I taught her to lie. One day, I took her bowl of purée and placed it upside-down on the dog’s head. Then I pointed to the dog a few times to make sure she go the idea. The dog, of course, shook the bowl off its head onto the floor and started licking the purée into the carpet tiles. When my mother walked back into the kitchen, saw the state of play and, not a little upset … thinking my sister might’ve thrown the bowl over onto the floor … asked “Who did that?”, my sister pointed at the dog. The dog was in a loooooooot of trouble.
2. When she was a bit older … around four or five years old … and my parents were out of the house (visiting the next door neighbours, gone to the corner shop, wherever ³), I would take a small mug, fill it with ridiculous amounts of instant coffee (twelve teaspoons or more), the same amount of sugar (if not more than that) and enough milk to give it a triple-thick-milkshake like consistency, add enough boiling water to liquify it a bit and make it warm … get my sister to drink it (all of it) and laugh myself stupid at the ensuing chaos — the dog got chased around the garden a lot (I made sure of it).
3. Around the same age (she was four or so), when my parents were out of the house (at work, shopping, wherever) my friends and I would pick numbers at random from the phone book and get my sister … who had still only relatively recently mastered speech and had a sweet little voice … to utter obscenities down the phone when someone answered.
4. When she wasn’t much older than that … maybe between the ages of seven and ten … my sister would threaten to grass me up to my parents whenever she caught me doing things we both knew I shouldn’t. I would then persuade her to join me in said activities, on the basis that they were fun. Then, when she was thoroughly complicit, advise her that telling our parents what I had been up to mightn’t be such a good idea … not now that she was an accomplice to them herself.
5. When I was a kid, one of my chores … when I had annoyed my mother enough and she wanted me to learn something ⁴ … was to tidy my parents’ bedroom. Of course, she didn’t stipulate how the task was to be completed and, one day, walked into her bedroom to find all the local kids for about four or five streets around in there … tidying it. I’m not sure what she found the most disconcerting: that all the local kids now knew what kind of state her bedroom had been in before they tidied it … that I had, somehow, managed to persuade them to tidy her bedroom rather than be out playing … or that I had charged them for the privilege of doing so — that’s right, I had got the neighbourhood kids to pay me to let them tidy my parents’ bedroom. Thinking about it now, I seem to recall that what she found most disconcerting of all was the way they kept paying me to be allowed to come back and do it again. I think after the sixth or seventh time, she stopped telling me to tidy her bedroom, for some reason.
6. When I was a young teen (around thirteen), some friends and I found some rope. So, we took it to the top of a cliff edge (a sheer, two-to-three hundred foot drop, a one foot wide ledge winding halfway down and treacherously slippy needle-grass all down it). We took turns to climb up it, whilst the other two of us sat at the top holding the rope. Until I got bored of the whole affair and introduced a new element to the activity: can you make it to the top of the two hundred foot drop before we let go of the rope … and, if you don’t, can you land on the one foot wide ledge halfway down? More than one pair of underwear needed changing that summer, let me tell you.
7. When I was nineteen, living in my first student hall of residence, the building consisted of two sections (the ‘old’ building and the ‘new’ annex). The old building was BIG … about a hundred foot high … and contained three, extremely high-ceilinged storeys above the ground floor. The annex was smaller, consisting of two, storeys above the ground floor (albeit still with high ceilings). There were two pay phones in the old building … one on the ground floor and one on the second. I would, not infrequently, amuse myself by going to the pay phone on the second floor (just outside the outer door to my room (so convenient), call the ground floor phone and let it ring and ring and ring, until someone traipsed all the way over from their room somewhere in one of the buildings (most frequently, of course, from the ground floor of the annex) and answered it. Then I’d ask them to fetch someone from the room furthest to the back of the top floor of the old building. When said person finally reached the phone, having made their way all the way down, only to learn that it was me on the phone and observe that they’d noticed me on the phone on the second floor as they’d passed by … and wtF did I want? … I’d say that I was just being friendly, enquiring after them, hoped they were okay and having a good day.
8. Another game I would play with the phones was to use the internal Pax system. Seven phones. Six buttons. All easily pressed simultaneously with three fingers from each hand, the receiver held to my ear with my shoulder. Press and … hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooold … the buzzer buzzing until someone, finally fed up enough to not sit there refusing to answer this time, like they promised themselves they wouldn’t after last time, picks it up and says “Hello?”. Let that button go, keep the others held. Moments later, someone on another floor: “Hello?”. Let that button go. Keep the other four pressed. First person: “Yes! Hello!” Second person: “Yes … hello.” First person: “What do you want?” Second person: “What?” First person: “What do you want?” Second person: “I don’t want anything. You buzzed the Pax, so I answered. What do you want?” First person: “What!? I didn’t …” Third person (exasperated that the phone has been buzzing for something like two minutes now and nobody else has answered in all that time): “Yes! What!?” First person and Second person: “WHAT!?” … Stop pressing the other buttons (if nobody else has answered in all that time, nobody’s going to and three is already enough confusion anyway by the sound of things) … cover mouthpiece as best as possible, as far from mouth as possible and try not to laugh so loud the others hear you.
9. An accomplice and I once attempted to hold McDonald’s up with water pistols. The Police were called. That’s all you need to know.
10. When I was a kid, it seems that whenever we moved ... which we did not infrequently ⁵ ... my parents would recommend other parents not let their kids play with me, because I was a bad influence — so my sister told me, anyway.

BONUS ITEM (more fun with phones): calling up the downstairs phone when I was out in town and asking the person who answered if I was in my room.

‎

BONUS ITEM (more fun than should be possible in a stairwell without sex and/or industrial quantities of hallucinogenics):

HahahahahaHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaa….

‎

Yes, my sister forgave me and we get along fine now — I even forgave her for showing me how to make a teaspoon burn once ⁶.

Okay … I’m gonna nominate Lorraine Heth, RehnWriter and Oliver “Shiny” Blakemore — this should be a giggle 😀

—
¹ And it’s not like I need a lot of convincing either, is it?

Black Sheep

² Especially if it’s the kind of fun I suspect I probably shouldn’t get up to — okay, okay … know I shouldn’t get up to … but who’s counting?

³ This was during the ‘latch-key kid’ era, when parents would get home after school was already over and we would walk ourselves home and let ourselves in, whilst they finished work — so, next door, or just up the road for five minutes wasn’t considered irresponsible.

⁴ I have no idea what … I didn’t pay attention.

⁵ No, I’m not implying that I was in any way instrumental in that — it’s quite possibly entirely coincidental.

⁶ Not only do I have to admit that I thoroughly deserved it but, secretly, I was impressed by her creativity, ingenuity … and quick reflexes.