This page is for a bunch of other bits and bobs I did in my childhood which aren't really singificant enough to be counted as "stories" (or Alpha Universe LARPs, as in the case of Anti Bully), but which still make for amusing reading. In very rough chronological order, though some things started before others but ran for longer / were more important to me as they went on.
Fire Eagles
The very early 90's were the hangover of the 80's, so there was still a bunch of cartoons designed to sell toys. Usually about some multinational military force with distinct characters and vehicles, against similar "baddies", whose characterisation was "We're the baddies! raaar!", and who were doing terrible things like borderline-enslaving poor third-world people in factories, or polluting the environment by making superflous plastic crap. You know, things the "good guys" would never do.
Anyway, I designed my own one called Fire Eagles. Blank paper to draw on was always in short supply in my childhood. When I was really young, the idea that there'd be blank sheets of paper available in the house was little more than a charming theory, and so several Fire Eagles pictures have survived on the endpapers of books I had at the time. They're pretty nonsensical messes of cool aircraft, explosions and people with laser guns.
I later got into warplanes, and just assumed that there must be a variant of the F15 Eagle called the "Fire Eagle" (I mean, it's such an obvious name...), which the USAF would have "copyright" on, so the Fire Eagles were abandoned. I had a bunch of similar ideas through my childhood with strange names. One was called "PelletTron", after pellets, the projectiles toy guns shoot, and M-Tron, a Lego Space faction. We were supposed to write a story about flying in a hot air balloon in English class, I wrote a story about a journey by Zeppelin that turned into PelletTron battling alien invaders. It was kind of a running gag with my teachers to see how I'd find a way to turn the story subject they gave us into science fiction. Another time we were supposed to write a story about being on a voyage with Columbus. It had to start like "I heard a sound like the firing of a gun, "Land!", someone shouted. In the morning..." ...I wrote a story about a military helicopter containing an experimental mecha suit crashing in my garden.
Splunge
One of our neighbours had a swimming pool, another had a big plastic paddling pool. My brother and I used to throw stones or clods of earth over the walls into them, just to hear the splash. We were little bastards. Later we threw stuff into ditches and dykes and got bollockings off farmers for blocking them up with crap. One time there was a glass bottle floating in a dyke, we were trying to throw stones at it to smash it. A farmer came along and we said we were "trying to make it float to the side with splashes" so we could take it out. He said he'd heard us saying "try to smash the bottle!", and of course we were all "nuhh we di'unt".
The Key of Wisdom
We were having one of the frequent "play afternoons" in the second year of primary school, when I found an old key behind a bookcase or somewhere. One of my friends told me it must be "The Key of Wisdom", I had no idea what "wisdom" meant (the key obviously wasn't working too well, then, eh?), but it sounded impressive. As little kids do whenever they find something cool or interesting, I immediately blabbed about it round the class. The bullies had it off me in five seconds flat, and then it disappeared (no doubt into the teacher's desk, as it actually opened something in the class). Over the next few weeks / days (which felt like months), my friends and I were on a "quest" to retreive the key from the kid we assumed still had it, probably locked up in a safe at home. Plans ranged from pretending to befriend him and stealing it, to just breaking into his house and stealing it. I imagined that once I got it, one ritual later would see me in a very Knightmare-like realm with the sound of a heartbeat booming out of nowhere, and multicoloured rainbow blobs scrolling on all the walls and floors... then something something profit. Of course, we didn't actually do anything. In the end I found a somewhat interestingly-coloured stone under the piano and decided it was the "backup" Key of Wisdom.
Oddly enough, years later my brother and I found a huge, very rusty key in the back garden, which might have been buried there for centuries. Then that went missing, too.
That time kids at school broke somebody's window
This was a huge drama on one day of my childhood. Kids at school were chucking lumps of dirt over the wall and watching them smash into dust against somebody's house. Inevitably one went in the window. The 2-3 boys were hauled into the headmaster's office and at least one had his mother called in (her arrival and walk to the door eagerly watched through the fence seperating the playground from the "front lawn" of the school like the press at a royal birth). A rumour flew round the school that the kids who did the breaking were going to be "grounded". We didn't have the faintest idea what "grounded" meant, but we'd seen it mentioned on live-action American kids' films and shows and, from the reaction of the kids in those shows, knew it was some unimaginably bad punishment. I could imagine the crestfallen kids sitting with their heads down, as the solemn headmaster rumbled "I'm afraid I have to recommend a grounding" to their parents.
In the way of 6-8 year olds, this rumour immediately became a fact in our minds. Their certain week of grounding became as much as a month in the more wildly-speculating quarters. Most of us reckoned it wouldn't be as much as a whole month, beleiving their parents would settle on a mere 4 weeks. Anyway the kids were eventually released from the office near the end of lunch time (which seemed a lot longer that day, I guess some classes were cancelled while every teacher was called in to the office for this grave event... but I really don't remember). They were immediately swarmed by excited crowds asking how long they were "grounded" for. They didn't have a clue what we were on about and got furiously angry at being asked the question over and over. Then the next day rolled around and we'd all forgot about it.
X Base
The "X Base" was a tree at the bottom of the school playing field with an X carved into it. I don't remember if one of us carved it, or if an older kid / one there before had and we just reinterpreted what it meant later. Either way, as kids do, our allegiances kept switching and changing daily, so sometimes I was "in" the X Base crowd, and sometimes I wasn't. We'd fight over exactly who "had" the X Base too. Supposedly it actually marked the entrance to a huge underground bunker full of tanks, planes and spaceships. One time when I was "out of" the X Base various kids drew pictures of "my" planes and tanks being blown up by "their" ones, which had X Base written on them. I just thought it was funny they were calling their planes and tanks "bases", as that would mean they didn't move.
The Kick Club
This was a thing my neighbour had during the tail end of the Turtles craze. It was supposed to be a martial arts dojo, but was actually just us swinging on his rope swing and kicking the trunk of the tree. We made appropriately-cool "hiii-yah!" sounds while doing it, though, so that's halfway there, right? Anyway, you had to pay 20p to join it, so I just gave him 20p. My brother counted out 20 1p's from his oft-inspected collection and proudly announced to our mum that it was his payment to join the club. Naturally she snatched the money off him and refused to let him pay, as they'd apparently "just run away with it". Uh, yeah? That's the point of paying for something, the person you paid doesn't give it back.
The kid who started it was later banned from taking people's money by his mum, after he explained it was a way to "get poundsh". He also had a slight lisp, which made his matter-of-fact statement to our teacher, that a scruffy kid at school had "got fleash", way more hilarious than it should have been.
Cub Stoppers
The Cubs are the younger version of the Boy Scouts (Beavers are the very young version, and there also used to be Rovers for 18+ aged Scouts who still wanted to camp and do woodcraft). Anyway a bunch of people at school were in it, and I wasn't, so I had a jealous tantrum and created Cub Stoppers. I wanted to get one of those big Mack / Peterbilt trucks from America, armour-plate it and cover it in heavy weaponry, then smash through the wall of the school and blow every Cubs member away. Actually I did nothing at all, what a surprise.
Bike Team
Another thing my neighbour and his friends came up with. We'd clean people's bikes for them for money... using our mum's washing up liquid and our dad's car washing sponges. At first we were united, and drew up flyers (all by hand - none of us had any real means of reproducing prints at this stage) to post around the village. We had a ridiculous pricing structure of something like 1 bike for 20p, 3 for 50p and 3 for £5 or something like that. Inevitably, as part of the "Summer Wars" (boy was the anime of that name a disappointment), we had a falling out and I decided to set up my own operation, which cost 4p to wash one bike (the "one bike" price war got really aggressive), or 20p to wash two. My dad told me that was ridiculous. I drew up another plan where "one or more bikes" would be washed for just 2p. None of us ever got a single customer.
Dog Extinction Campaign (DEC)
A friend of my mum had sons around the same age as my brother and me, so we visited them a few times. They also had a dog, who came running up to sniff and greet me. I was scared of dogs, so dreamed of getting revenge by exterminating every dog in the world. I was "designing" cool vehicles such as spaceships / planes which I'd stolen off the CGI intro of a TV show with music videos (it was also sponsored by Twix chocolate bars, and I had copied the Twix logo written on the windows of the ships) and, erm, Lada estate cars which would pump out poison gas that only kills dogs. I could imagine one of these cars bumping across a field, pumping out red gas from it's open boot, on the Channel 4 news.
Bike Grand Prix (BGP)
My brother and I, with occasional guests (there was about 10 of us on one gloriously chaotic day) racing around the garden on our bikes. There were very few overtaking opportunities and it was a barrage of sore-losership with "accidental" crashes if it looked like you were being overtaken, then insisting the race was red-flagged and you had to start again. If the non-crashed rider continued to ride he would be hauled off. Also lapping didn't exist, if you were in front, you were in the lead, so we'd "crash" for a lap and "get back on" just in time to pull out in front of the field. I'm amazed this went on for as long as it did. There were also bike rallies, timed using the timer from a Screwball Scramble board game. My brother was ridiculously slow at this, so I'd rewind the timer several times so he "wouldn't grizzle". Unfortunately this once gave him an extremely fast time I couldn't beat.
My mum's friend had two daughters who were about our age, who would visit some times. Obviously they weren't interested in racing (and hadn't bought their bikes, anyway). They did help us make somewhat pleading posters for spectators to come and watch the races, which we blu-tacked to the exterior of the caravan, facing the road. Mum wouldn't let me have a plastic folder to put the poster in, so it had to be re-made every time there was rain. Inevitably we were soon racing in front of excited crowds of... nobody.
Cold War Delta Force Motorbikes Ripoff Nonsense
A game played at school a few times. Basically I'd watched a bunch of The Avengers, The Champions etc, as well as the movie Delta Force, and mangled them together into my head into a scenario of riding round country lanes on motorbikes with guns, blasting at "baddies" in pre-war cars. I got my friends to play it, too. As it was set in the 50's or 60's, we were supposed to be riding old Nortons, Vincents, BSAs and so on. Only I couldn't remember any of those names, so I just said the bikes we were meant to be on were "Ole' ones wiv sideways numbaplates on tha frunt". My mates were saying that they were riding Yamakawakki Spreadsheet entries, which didn't sound right. They were probably talking about some Japanese bikes from the 80's. I kept saying we were supposed to be on "Them really ole' ones!", and eventually gave the game up, because they weren't "taking it seriously".
Trying to make a time machine
There was two versions of this, both involved putting assorted bits of gubbins we'd get out of smashed-up old car radios, tape players, toys etc into cardboard boxes, then sliding them down the stairs. The acceleration would then, of course, cause time travel. This was first done at my neighbour's house, he rode in the "time machine" himself, half-demolishing the hat stand at the bottom of the stairs. After his parents made it clear that we were not trying that again, the idea sat for a while. Later we tried it round my house with my friend Robert instead. As the time machine was "experimental", we put teddy bears in it. As time went on it changed from sober scientific experimentation into "make the coolest-looking crash we can". My dad had badly installed a socket at the bottom of the stairs, putting the whole thing ON the wall, instead of the inside assembly IN the wall. One particularly well-laden time machine, with every teddy bear all 3 of us owned in it, ripped this off the wall, leaving exposed live wires. That was the end of the second round of experimentation.
Later on, I told the story of the first experiment at my secondary school. The reaction from the other kids in my year was "Errr, 'e reck's 'e's got tiime machiiine", then months of bullying. It was not a particularly "capable" year. The ones above and below us seemed cool and smart, but I got stuck with the thicks. Mind you, if I'd been in one of them years I'd have been the thick one, so it was swings and roundabouts.
Cat Patrol
My brother and I got the video of The Aristocats one easter, and watched it several times. We imagined that the scene at the end where a bunch of cats attack the butler was a situation that people experienced often. We created a new emergency service which existed to capture cats when they invade people's houses en-masse. We designed a load of water / net based weapons and drew big battle scenes of us against hordes of cats. I also started designing the office we'd have, because 90's kids were crazy about stationery, photocopiers and such things.
Hawk Star
Inspired by one of those mini rides they have outside supermarkets (do those still exist? Now that I think about it I don't think I saw one for years before I left the UK), where you put in 20p and it jiggles about a bit and plays sound effects. This was a sport about racing hovering motorbikes with jet engines. This was years before Wipeout, or the pod racing in Star Wars episode 1. I was a Sega kid too, so hadn't played F-Zero (but had probably seen pictures of it on TV, on Bad Influence, Games Master or Def 2 Cyberzone... now there's a piece of obscurity for ya). Anyway the different teams all had bird names, like Robin Star, Eagle Star etc. Only in a picture I drew I wrote them all like "Robin*", because writing out words is hard work, apparently. I was, of course, the lead rider for Hawk Star. But how could I ensure I was always the winner? Simple, give the different teams different top speeds! Robin Star could only go something like 250mph, while Hawk Star could go 999mph! The other teams apparently kept on competing even though they obviously couldn't win. I did diplomatically create a team called Super Star, whose bikes could go 1000mph, but apparently going 1mph more than 999 made them "too dangerous", so they were disqualified... or "No lonnger in race", as I put it.
Hawk Star might show up again in Teddy Bear World, the flying jet bikes would fit the setting.
Box Demolition Derby
It probably had a cooler and more sci-fi name. Basically we'd decorate and embellish cardboard boxes with toilet roll tubes, old plastic containers and bits of other boxes, draw cool sci-fi controls on the inside of them, cut windows in them and then... put them on our heads and run into each other. The idea was to create a load of smashed-up debris, so I made a "you must ignore damage" rule. Naturally the first thing my brother did after being hit once was take his back off his head and gasp "daaamaaagee!" in awestruck horror. We usually did this indoors (often when friends came round), tripping over furniture and knocking down ornaments. At least one time we did it out in the garden instead. The neighbours must have wondered what the hell they were looking at.
Anti-Illegal Logging
I watched a report on Blue Peter once, about "illegal logging", which was framed as a "save the rainforests" type of thing, with a bunch of footage of the poor widdle orangutangs or whatever, who were losing their habitats. Anyway I suspect by "illegal logging" the police of the place, whom the show followed a bit, actually meant "logging by people who don't pay their taxes", and the only "saving" they were doing was saving the trees for when the legitimate logging corporations can come in.
Anyway, none of this meant anything to me. I just knew there was a place somewhere (foreign countries, and the fact life in them isn't just the same as in England, but with different-looking people and better weather, didn't mean much to me at the time) with loads of trees and gravel roads, where "baddies" needed stopping. At one point in the show they rode with the cops, who went speeding over to where some logging was reported in their landrover, but the illegal loggers had been tipped-off, and scarpered. This, once again, meant nothing to me, the only thing I thought was "the landrovers are too slow, they need faster vehicles!". I started creating a new organisation who would stop the illegal logging, and even designing the vehicle we would use - which looked like an unholy mashup of an Austin Maestro panel van and the "Modulo" concept car I'd seen in a book. It was going to have a V8 engine with 16 valves. I had no idea what "16 valves" meant, but it was on all the car adverts I saw on telly. My dad told me a "really sporty" V8 would need 32 valves, but that didn't "sound right" to me.
Anyway, we also played this game around our gardens / village / the school, imagining we were speeding down bumpy gravel tracks like rally drivers, catching the loggers in the act, and shooting them with Uzis.
I probably spelled it "elegal".
Little Downham UFO Research
Around 1993 I got a book about UFO's. I decided to do some "UFO spotting" with my brother and, on our very first night of looking out of his window we actually saw something a bit mysterious, a silver oval with coloured lights on that seemed to be flying silently. My brother called it a "Megaprise" (a portmanteau of "mega" and "Enterprise", as in Star Trek, which my friend named some of his spaceships), but I realised it might be an actual UFO. I rushed downstairs to get one of our cameras, but I couldn't work out if there was still unused film in it and faffed about for way too long. When I got back it was gone, and my brother was pretty nonchalant about the whole event. I told my friends about it at school and they said it was probably a helicopter, hot air balloon, AWACS plane with the radar illuminated etc.
I thought no more about it until maybe a year or so later, when I bought it up again. My friends were obviously all beleivers (or at least had a better-developed sense of adventure) by this time, as suddenly they could all remember seeing it that same night too, as it apparently made a zig-zag course across the area. We immediately founded a UFO research organisation and, for the next 3 or so years did on-and-off nighttime staring into the sky, excitedly overreacting to every helicopter, plane, space station and satellite. We also took various photos of these... through a closed window with the flash on. When we got the pictures back it was a bit of a disappointment, though I was briefly excited that we'd captured bright rectangular "ghost UFO's" that had been invisible at the time.
Of course we saw the really juicy stuff when we were doing it alone. One friend's house was buzzed by a glowing orange craft with "legs" on the back, another saw a disc-shaped cloud moving against the wind. Before long we were all in repeated contact with aliens and acting as ambassadors for Earth on a nightly basis... We briefly had a ghost investigation team too, which had similar encounters with people from the past (who we had long conversations with) / glowing floating skulls in battered top hats. One of the latter flew into my friend's head and gave him the superpower of being able to headbutt things really hard. Strangely all of these amazing things never happened when more than one person was present... funny that. Any suggestion of reporting these sightings to the police / army / "real" ghost investigators was shot down by the friend who had the most of them. They'd "never beleive some KIDS!", apparently. This was the same friend who was convinced a "minor publisher" would be only too glad to have our crap, scribbled comics.
I also got my cousin in on this. He, too, began to have nightly alien abductions where he would share human culture with the aliens, and see their technology. Apparently they'd never thought of using television for entertainment until they came to Earth. Not even when they had advanced to the point where everybody has a "TV Camera" and a means of "broadcasting" in their pocket? Odd that these aliens, who were encountered in the 90's, didn't have that sort of technology, even though they had FTL! He had his own ghost encounter, too. He had a collection of model trains (another hobby we were into at the time), and woke up to find the ghost of an old-time railway worker inspecting them and telling him he had a "fine collection".
On one UFO-spotting night, Robert set his PC to display the "starfield" screensaver, and just waited. I was intently staring out of the window when I suddenly noticed his PC was "showing space". He told me it had "never done that before" and I imagined that the aliens were showing us their journey, if only we could identify those stars we could trace their journey back and identify where they came from! Unfortunately he touched the mouse and "interrupted it" before we saw them get to Earth. I didn't have a PC of my own at the time, so knew nothing about screensavers and whatnot. I even thought his password was "*****"! He got pretty angry when, having started secondary school, I saw a PC in the office displaying the "journey through space" as I walked past! Clearly the aliens were tracking me and trying to show me "the rest of the journey" through another computer. Robert had no idea what I was on about initially, then couldn't beleive I'd fallen for his prank.
Actually my cousin also got in on my gullibility with UFOs. He said he'd been on holiday in America and got some "Roswell Metal", which he had on his shelf. It was tightly-crumpled tinfoil. There was also an advert on at the time with one of the Apollo astronauts who'd driven the moon buggy talking about "Aluminum" cars. Being British, we'd never heard it pronounced that way before. I thought it was some newly-invented wonder metal called "Illuminum", which also sounds like "Illusion", so is obviously mysterious and cool. My cousin told me he had an "illuminum pen", which was just a biro. He wrote some squiggles on his hand which he said would solidify into thin metal and peel off. We went to the cinema, and after the movie I was asking him "'As that mettul cum off yet?". He was angrily shreiking "It's just a biro you idiot!"
None of these encounters with aliens, ghosts and whatnot scared us, of course... Though one time a friend and I were sitting in the park, talking about our encounters with vampires, when another kid sneaked right up behind and scared the absolute shit out of us. Our paranormal investigations began to peter out as Anti Bully started up, though there was some overlap in the last months of primary school.
Trying to shoot down birds with super soakers
This was a short-lived offshoot of the UFO watching. We were trying to spot UFO's during the daytime, and one of us noticed that loads of birds were congregating on the big radio mast of the disused truck depot where my dad had previously worked. We got it into our heads that the birds were under alien control, and watching us. Thomas admitted "guys, I'm scared!", and Robert asked me if I had any lasers. I was the kid at school who was into "technical" things, and in cartoons and comics the kid who is into technical things always has amazing, hi-tech inventions, so I must too, right? I dubiously brandished my super soaker saying "we got these...". Robert said he meant real lasers, I said you could still shoot birds with super soakers as they'd get "waterlogged wings" and be unable to fly. Apparently I'd never heard of ducks or swans. We ended up laying on our backs on my dad's pile of garage pieces, shooting water at any birds who flew low, right over us. Every one that was "missed", or insufficiently waterlogged to be shot down, would be reported to "other outposts" on "the radio", which was either a broken car radio, a non-connected and probably broken old car CB, or just a block of wood.
Dinner Lady Disruption (DLD)
At my primary school the dinner ladies didn't just serve the dinner, they also patrolled the playground during lunchtime to keep discipline and stop bullying, a task they were exactly 100% unable to do (or even attempt). They much preferred to stop fun stuff like piggyback fights (little kids ride on the back of big kids and try to pull each other off. In Japan this is actually a sports day event, only they have to try and take a card out of a band on the other's head). I started an organisation called DLD or Dinner Lady Disruption (actually, it was called Dinner Lady Destroyers for the first few days). Basically we would pretend to be fighting, or tell them there was a fight elsewhere, so they'd go somewhere else and thus leave us to have fun. It even worked on one occasion, but otherwise we were pretty terrible liars.
I also wanted to create a whole bunch of DLD equipent like smoke bombs, itching powder bullets and go-kart like vehicles we'd secrete in bunkers around the school and storm onto the field on. None of that ever happened, of course. Oh also for a while I took it really seriously. We had three playtimes at that school, the morning one would be for "training", lunch time "active duty" and then the last playtime "evaluation" of how things had gone at lunch time, and preparing the next day's training. The whole thing petered out when I discovered that, if you hadn't been caught for bad behaviour before the bell rang, it didn't mean you'd "got away" and wouldn't be punished. In my last year of primary school I briefly revived DLD as the Skool Stinx Team, this lasted one lunch time, but for the rest of my time there one of the "lesser able" kids would always point to my friends and I and go "yew lot are the SST's in'tcha?". He apparently thought it was our "gang".
Crash Crazy
Making cool-looking crashes with toy cars. This had it's own theme tune, which was basically "greased lightning", but replaced with "crash crazy". We did it in the school hall, where the cars would travel straight and true into each other / the walls over the smooth floor. The school was actually a glorified prefab, so after several rounds of cars bumping into the wooden walls / us singing the song at the top of our lungs, the teachers kicked us out. It wasn't quite as fun on the bumpy surface of the playground. Also the cars didn't get dented / crumpled and smashed like the racing cars on TV. A friend did lend me one of his cars, which was pristine. This one did get plenty dented and chipped, he looked pretty dubious when I handed it back to him. Towards the end of school, a new boy just handed over a high-quality, large-scale model of a mercedes to me. Such things were about £12.99 in the shops at the time (and closer to £40 today!)... I don't know what ended up happening to it, though.
That time we had actual gangs
Speaking of which, near the end of primary school some of the kids in my class started wanting to create gangs. The school had a loose uniform code (it was barely even a proper uniform, just specified colours) that wasn't enforced at all, they started saying you had to wear black jeans to be cool enough to be in the gang. If you had black jeans with the character "Spliffy" on them, you could be a leader. None of us knew what the fuck "spliffy" meant (the first friend I made at secondary school pronounced it "spiffby"), later one kid pretended a plastic bottle was a joint, because he'd heard Spliffy "smokes pop". When I told my mum I wanted to wear black jeans to school one morning she got ridicuously overexcited about my wish to " be trendy" and started turning out my closet to create a "trendy" outfit. We let one of our friends be in the gang even with the uniform, because his mum was on the governors and wouldn't let him be cool.
Anyway I think the coolest kids, who liked hip-hop, dreamed of recreating the Bloods and Crips in Little Downham. Most of the rest of us got our knowledge of teenage gangs from Grease and our dads' memories of the Mods and Rockers. The "enemy" gang called themselves The Wanderers. I thought that was a cool name, but they were the enemy so we had to march on to the field singing a song making fun of it. Also I was still just about in the "wanting to build spaceships from junk in the allotments" phase, so drew a gunsight in a yoghurt pot and said it was our device for "shooting down their planes". The whole badass gangsta thing fell apart after about 3 days.
Also, around the same time, we started hating our names and wanting to change them when we grew up. We didn't want to have "Christian" names. A "Christian" name was obviously anything from the Bible, like the names of the gospels or the Disciples. If we weren't sure a name was in the Bible (none of us would admit to ever having read a page of it, of course), you could test if a name was "Christian" or not by saying it in the voice of a posh old lady. A name was "cool" if it could be said in a fake American accent with a heavy dose of 90's 'tude. I remember one friend wanted to name himself Max, I don't remember what I wanted to call myself.
Walk-O-Bot
Galactic Conquest was (and will be!) a big series of comic strips, but we also acted out various parts of it using stuff we'd made of Lego. This was a whole chaotic mess probably deserving of it's own page (as was The Gun, when that first started). One aspect of it, though, was a seperate, and very annoying, thing - Walk-O-Bot! This was a lego box from an M-Tron or Blacktron set. My brother put a "light" element on top of it and would have it shuffling around saying "Walk-O-Bot!" in a "cute" voice. He also made Walk-O-Bot's recharger, using up almost all of the red and yellow light elements I wanted for other things I was building. Every new thing I made would be eagerly scruitinised and I'd no doubt be asked "is that off Walk-O-Bot's recharger?". The fucking thing hardly ever needed "recharging" anyway.
My brother got lego of his own for birthdays, Christmas etc. It all got broken up and put in the same box. Whenever I made something that used a cool part off something he'd got originally, I'd always get told "I hope you know that bit's mine". He'd always be "hoping" I "knew" things. I dreaded new videogames that had a two-player mode, I'd inevitably have to go through the motions of letting him win. After one epic fight our dad told us to seperate out his bits. Having done that with the cool bits he owned, dad then asked us whose the rest was, no doubt intending to deliver some sort of moral lesson, after we'd tearfully admitted "we share those!" Yeah, well, real life isn't cartoons, bub, so as my brother dithered I just snapped "they're MINE!". The seperation lasted about 3 days before our dad forgot all about it, "found" loose lego in his room and went strolling to my room to put it in the box, "where it goes", without a care in the world. I had to chase him and frantically plead with him to stop.
Little Downham Turbo Tour
Inspired by the Isle of Man TT, this was an event I wanted to create in Little Downham, after asking permission for the nebulous "people in charge". Instead of using motorbikes, kids would race home-made wooden contraptions powered by lawnmower engines. Which would be neither turbocharged, nor particularly fast. I also didn't give much consideration to the fact that, well, Little Downham would't make a particularly interesting race track.
The Big Base
Just before Anti Bully started, all the kids in the village briefly collaborated on hacking out a large hedge / overgrown area at the bottom of the park, creating a passage through to the field beyond, two "rooms" inside the undergrowth and a "hide" / lookout post on top of a big pile of sand. The corrugated metal the hide was constructed from was apparently "found" somewhere, and our playing about in it resulted in a round hay bale getting collapsed. The big "bully" kids, and their friends, were obviously the lords of the manor, my friends and I were guards. Inevitably fights started and my friends and I decided to claim another base, though the bullies took that over too. My dad told me that, when he'd been a kid, there had been another base in the middle (the two that existed at this time, around 1994, were in the corners). We started to hack that out, but another of the bullies told us it had "belonged" to his dad, so it was theirs. Of course, I'd blabbed all the details of what my dad said to them. If we'd just told them we were making a new base they had no claim to, they'd have been none the wiser. Then beaten us up and taken it. We also had a fun encounter with a "maniac" in a creepy blue mask during the construction of this base. This was later "retconned" into an Anti Bully case.
We decided to actually make a new base, and, as the bullies were not there, to steal some of the corrugated metal they'd made their hide from. The bullies appeared in the park as we were carting it across. We panicked and began to hestitate between taking it back to their base, or just running. Another time the farmer it turned out they'd stolen the corrugated metal from / whose hay bale they'd destroyed, "caught" us all there and yelled at us. Also, at around this time one of the friends of the bullies who was my age got hold of a lighter. I had it in my possession at one point, I was terrified my parents would find it, partly because it was something used for smoking, and partly because it said "this is my fucking lighter" on it. The swear word would make a bad situation 10 times worse. Eventually that guy came round one morning and took the lighter off me.
A few days later sirens could be heard in the distance and my friend appeared in the garden, excitedly shouting "the base is on fire!". The whole thing was burned flat, and that was the end of that. Though this was (shortly) before Anti Bully started, we decided to become detectives and "investigate" whoever was likely to have started the fire. The list of suspects was basically every kid we didn't like... and that went nowhere. One friend insisted that the lighter I'd given to a kid my age must been "passed up the chain" to older kids we knew, and then "all their big mates". It was those "big mates" who must have started the fire, as kids of circa 10 years old would never dare to play with fire.
That time we were circa 10 years old and wanted to play with fire.
Sometime after the base-burning-down incident, I was hanging around with my friend Robert and some of the more "gangsta" kids. The ones who had tried to start the embarrasing attempt at bringing South Central LA to Little Downham primary school (which is just silly, that all went on at Ely secondary school). They had an awesomely badass plan to "start a small fire then put it out right away". We walked around for ages, eventually found some matches (apparently they'd stashed some in a hedge), but didn't have a striker. I suggested striking the matches on the ground, like in cartoons, but they weren't "strike anywhere" (not sure those even exist in the UK. They're probably illegal, wouldn't put it past our bunch of petty, cowardly tyrants). We eventually found a very manky and soaked empty box of matches. They tore the striker off that and feebly tried to light a match. All it did was make the match wet, so we abandoned that plan.
Tilt Ball
Hey, I actually know exactly when this one happened! Around December 25th 1994 - probably circa January 5th 1995. It was a bunch of cardboard boxes joined up to represent a huge plane / airship. You "played" as a ball and had to make it to the exit by tilting it to roll through the whole thing and get to an "escape pod". By new year's day it was so huge and unwieldy that it took two of us just to hold it up. It wasn't that hard to play, so we got bored of it, then our mum and dad got fed up with it occupying half the living room floor.
Environment Freedom, A.R.E, H.A.R.E and H.A.T.E
Around 1994 I started getting into opposing fox hunting and animal testing. All the usual idealistic shit little kids beleive in. I still also beleived that with a bit of hammering and scrounged bits and pieces laying around allotments, I'd be able to build spacecraft. Environment Freedom was slightly more realistic, I only wanted to build WW2-level aircraft and armoured cars, as well as repurposing an oil tanker to a solar-powered aircraft carrier (with a freakin' solar deck?) with a ram. The aim would be to massacre fox hunters and animal testers, take on the French navy to stop their nuclear testing, and assist the people who were tunneling under that forest to stop the Newbury bypass being built.
Later on I downsized these expectations to only building one modest airship with several WW1-era machine guns on it. Naturally all this shit was a major bully attraction, going into secondary school. One time I overheard a kid in maths class saying he was going hunting that weekend, shooting rabbits with air rifles. I realised I really had to "get on with" my airship that night if I was going to come hoving into view as he stalked his local allotments and blow him away in a hail of .303. I also produced some gloriously gore-soaked Envrionment Freedom recruitment posters (it was the age of Benetton's Banksy-tier "clever" poster campaign).
I got my cousin in to it as well. He started designing planes with "tomato turrets" and "egg bombs". When I said they were supposed to have real bullets and bombs he started going on about how we couldn't kill people. His dad was a cop, and he said if we killed anyone he'd report us to the "junior police", which the children of police officers were enrolled in. He then immediately shrieked "and yes, that is a real thing!". Well, that was me convinced. My friend Robert was in Environment Freedom too. As with the later Anti Bully, he tried to seize leadership of it, then started his own splinter group. He'd also broken his arm at the time, so was drawing his ship and plane designs with the wrong hand, which made them look wonderfully wonky and babyish.
Anyway, as is the way of a kid, I drifted in and out of interest for things. Envrionment Freedom went to the back of my mind for a few months that felt like years, before returning as A.R.E, or Animal Rights Enterprises (I called lots of things that had nothing to do with business "enterprises" back then). I imagined recruiting posters with phrases like "A.R.E you interested in animal rights?". I'd also recently gotten into loudly opposing racism. I thought that being a 12 year old in Cambridgeshire in 1996 and not being racist somehow made me a unique, special and enlightened individual. With this in mind I added H to make Human and Animal Rights Enterprises, or H.A.R.E. I also had a design for a plane with a heavily armoured front end and a propellor at the rear, so it'd be able to crash right through buildings and hills. Shame it wouldn't actually fly to begin with. I called it a H.A.R.Ecraft.
Later on, getting bullied (and by fuck did I deserve it, eh? Coming up with all this virtue-signalling shit) and imagining that people around me were racist even though they weren't, caused me to instead want to create a supervillain organisation and kill everybody. This organisation was called Harmful Action-Taking Enterprises, or H.A.T.E. At the time my form (aka Homeroom) at school was called 8SQ, the 8 being the school year and SQ being the initials of the form teacher. I wrote it as H.A.T.E-SQ once, because "hate" sounds like "8", obviously, and some girl got her knickers in a twist thinking I was planning a school shooting. Apparently I'd written I "hated that teacher".
The "School Survival" book
When I was at primary school one of my friends created a hilarious (well, it was to us) book about our own school and teachers. Somehow I ended up with it. His favourite joke was "tell the teacher there's a fight in the playground, and when they look out of the window, shove a curtain pole up their arse". Only he also couldn't spell to save his life, so it was more like "shuv a curtin poll up there ars". My mum found it and was initially angry with me for writing a swear word. When I told her somebody else at school wrote it, she immeiately pivoted to "his handwriting's better than yours".
It also had a guide on how to kill the teachers. The headmaster's one just said "KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL coffin"
Survive At Skool
A blatant ripoff of something similar published by Funfax (of Spy File, and thus Anti Bully fame.), only their "school" was spelled properly. The initials "SAS" being an obvious nod to the glut of books about "the regiment" that were around in the 90's. It never amounted to much and thus, unlike SLOP, isn't worth a proper entry. It's main purpose was basically to add in the things other "school survival" books always seemed to leave out. Namely an entry about "handicappeds" and how they "get away with murder", discipline-wise. Those books also seemed to leave out ways to actually cause trouble and sabotage your school, which I found odd.
I never created very much for it, aside from an introduction page that promised things such as "what's REALLY in the staff room", the page about handicappeds, and a guide to the loudness of different brands of school bells, based on the ones that were at my own school. There were a few other things, but it pretty quickly petered out and was forgotten about.
Oh, also my brother was getting Simpsons comics, and they had a series of pull-out-and-file guides to survive at school, supposedly written by Bart. They even had a way to fight back! It was "Take notes about all the stupid stuff that happens around you, wait 20 years, use the notes as the basis for a wildly-successful TV series".
The Time my Cousin Tried to Make A "Junior Police" For Real
He liked old 1950's war films, the early Railway Series, Ealing comedies, his dad's collection of latter-day Boys' Own, and so on. He had a pet bird called Spike, who he nicknamed "Spunky Gal". He wanted to create a "junior police" called "Spike's Patrol", for which he'd designed T-shirts with her face and the slogan "Spunky Gal" underneath. He had no idea. The tortures I went through as I tried not to laugh shouldn't be allowed under the Geneva convention.
Attacking the School with Model Planes
When I first started at secondary school, the newest building wasn't quite finished. Some ceiling tiles were missing, and I could see up into the void, which was lined with all pipes and cables. It reminded me of the interior of the second Death Star. I wanted to build mini-Spitfires, with rotating cameras in the cockpits, and fly them into the school. They'd have mini-missiles to shatter windows / ceiling tiles, and shoot steel pellets at bullies / teachers / anyone, really. The idea was my friends and I would all pretend to be sick, then come up near the school in a van (how we'd drive it there, I don't know). Each plane would be controlled by a control station with a TV screen and joystick in the back.
Later I imagined another school doing the same thing, but attacking our school. For some reason I imagined their planes looking like H.A.R.E. craft. This terrible, unforgivable attack by enemy planes would suddenly turn our spitfires into the heroic defenders of the school, and we'd have an air-to-air battle through the buildings.
Sometimes I want to actually make this story as a comic, for one of my kid-aimed comics. It's a bit difficult to "down to earth" it, though.
The Monsters Game
I don't think this ever had a proper name. We came up with it round our friend Stephen's house. It was mostly inspired by the sidescrolling Jurassic Park games on the 16-bit systems. We came up with a bunch of monsters and two adventurers. One of us would be the monsters and the other two would be the adventurers, who would have to get through some secret base (gov't name: Stephen's house). A twist being there were no guns, you just had to punch and kick the monsters. The only one I can remember now is a "Speedy", a small "velociraptor"-type monster with feeble vestigial "wings" instead of nasty claws. IE rather more like a real velociraptor than the ones in Jurassic Park! Being very videogamey, a Speedy required three kicks or six punches to be killed. Actually I don't remember if the setting actually had killing, or if the monsters were just "stunned"
One time I was one of the monsters, one that couldn't see well but relied on hearing. They were sneaking up on me in a dark room, and just about to attack, when my brother farted.
Another time at Stephen's house, we did another game where we pretended to be an enemy from one or the other of the FPS games at the time. The other two had to kill the monster, then guess what it was. I made it clear we weren't using the monsters from "that game". I was the Alien Queen one time. My brother suddenly ran up and started punching and kicking me while I was "tail whipping" him into a pulp... though as I don't actually have a tail, this was hard to put across. Eventually multiple mag dumps from Stephen killed me, and I told them I was the Alien Queen. My brother goes "Uh fort you wuz uh Speedy".
The Original Bughunt
This was a series of videogames I dreamed of making (before I had anything like the ability to do so). Later on I "repurposed" videogames, "imagining" my own graphics and scenarios over whatever was happening on the screen. The "plot" of this was that there was a service of people with shrink rays, who'd shrink themselves down to tiny size and clear the bugs out of your house / garden with military tactics. I did this "mind-repurposing" with Doom a lot (Ironic, eh?). Also with a demo of Felony 11-79, where I imagined the player was actually driving a toy car through a garden, being chased by a cat.
As the actual Bughunt was made in Doom, I set it in the "Doom Universe" mainly so I'd be able to re-use a lot of the graphics.
The Brief Period of Excitement Over Emulation
The first time I heard of emulation was when my friend said he could download N64 games off the internet and play them on his PC. The N64 and Playstation were the current consoles of the time. My friend also had a CD burner. I excitedly asked if he could burn N64 roms to CD's, because that'd make them WORK ON THE PLAYSTATION. I got my brother all excited too, before my friend pointed out that there were one or two little issues with my plan.
Anti Bully
This was a big one, so it has it's own page here
Fenland Anarchy Team (F.A.T)
This was a big one, so it has it's own page here