my dad is an 8 year old
I could tell you tons of stuff about my dad but it would take ages and get really boring. So, I will concentrate on one aspect of my relationship with him.

FIREWORKS

When we lived in Holland our father/son bonding would take place primarily around some sort of explosive device.

I think it was to guide me rather than watch me blow myself up. He and my mum found a home made firework which I had manufactured with the village doctor's son. It was a copper pipe which had a mixture made up of the powder taken from 100 bangers, 3 dozen crushed sparklers and, having found ourselves short of explosives, my mate went and raided his dad's cabinet to the tune of 10 shotgun cartridges. We split the mixture fifty fifty between two pipes and went outside. The first "device" caused 3000 guilders worth of damage to a mercedes and dispatched a neighbours moggy. The second one was found by my mum who used to make explosive detonators for ICI.

Anyhoo, having set up the story, my dad decided he should take me under his wing. First he got the local mechanic/petty criminal to set us up with a box of black widow bangers. These were banned in Holland due to the unpredictable fuses and oversized explosive load We used these to:

- wake up his hungover mate by tying one to a 4 metre length of pvc cable pipe and setting it off outside his window. At 9am on a Sunday in a small village of Dutch reformists who were on their way to church at the time.

-blow up my little sisters sunflowers in a controlled demolition fashion (they were dead)

-make anti personnel frisbees (by tying one to an old CD and launching it before it shattered into a million shards in the explosion)

-make a mortar with a steel pipe and a sack of marbles

-when we found out the fuses were waterproof (if you held them for a few seconds---I still dont have a clue how we both still have all of our fingers) he tied one to a brick and dropped it down the well in the back garden. You didnt so much hear it as feel it from the feet up. My Mum was at the other side of the house and felt it. She wasnt too pleased but we though it was brilliant, so we had to relocate....

-....to the local harbour at midnight the same night. We tied about 20 of them to bricks and went to play WW2 depth charge launcher. It was pitch black and the bangers made a huge globe of light under the water. I was 12 at the time. It was fucking incredible!

The bangers were such a resounding success that he picked up about 30 boxes of them when he was in Belgium. I sold them at school for a tidy profit and kept a few back for me and my dad to scare the locals some more. It got to the point that we would go on cycle rides during the evening, each with a pocket full of these things and a match box taped to our handlebars (they had a friction fuse.

The party was over when he decided to recycle a partially used roman candle. He sliced it open with a flourish and extracted the remaing three projectiles. He then beckoned my sister and I to come closer as he held a flame to the first one. He thought it would go straight up. However, without the cardboard tube to guide it, it zipped over my little sister at about shoulder height, leaving an impressive charred dot dash effect across my 7 year old sister's white sweater.

A quick tidy up saw her kitted out with a new sweater before my mum came home. However, he failed to notice the burned hair either side of her face.

Mum did though.

The fireworks mysteriously stopped after that.


Although, we did try to have one last hurrah.

When we were back in the UK my Dad took me for a wander. Straight to a shop selling all sorts of fireworks. We spent £35 on a single rocket and packed it away in a case. We were sniggering and laughing as we drove through customs to get on the ferry.

A few nights after getting back to Holland we went to a field in the middle of nowhere and lit this big fucker and RAN!

We looked around expecting a sheet of flame followed by a hiroshima like explosion which would rock our very soul.

Instead it limped into the sky and simply fizzled. We walked back to the car without saying a word. Part of me died that day. Stupid British standard fireworks.

801 words. No apologies for a single millimetre of it.
(OTT, Wed 1 Dec 2010, 20:36, Reply)