A camping trip up near lake Bala in wales, with my old man, just the two of us, a tent, a few basic supplies and foods we couldn't possibly improvize like bacon, eggs, tinned beans, bangers for making breakfast.
One morning I dragged us both, before breakfast, up a mountain, hiking, not so steep climbing equipment needed, all forested, whilst I picked wild mushrooms, got wild oyster mushrooms, MUCH firmer, not soggy like the flabby crap shops flog, fresh off a dead or dying silver birch trunk, nice and young, got us slippery jacks, larch boletes (both Suillus, rather than true boletus species, pores underneath, slime layer on top of the caps, that has to be peeled off before eating, very good eating indeed, a favourite of mine when served russian style, deslimed, garlic butter to fry the caps, then served with a squeeze of lemon juice on top, common species too, growing under pines, very tasty), got us ceps (Boletus edulis, one of THE most commercially important mushrooms that still comes totally from the wild, as they are mycorrhizal, forming associations with trees and as with most mycorrhizal fungi either haven't been cultivated or are very hard to do so), these being the ones known to gourmet restaurants at shocking prices as 'porcini', and same as are used in canned mushroom soup, as they retain their powerful mushroom-y flavour even after canning or drying or pressure cooking) and prized as one of the best. And hedgehog fungus, Hydnum spp. H.repandum, the best of them, being what I found, unusual for their having pointy, soft spines under the cap rather than either gills or pores, even a few chanterelles, lots and lots of variety, brought back a real big sack of top notch finds and goodies, that we fried up with bacon, sausages, baked beans, fried eggs, etc. and turned a camp breakfast into a gourmet meal, courtesy of the mushroom-hunting skills I taught myself starting at age 4, and have been honing all my life. Absolutely wonderful, especially since I'd dragged my old man up a mountain before we ate so much as a bite, in order to work up a real monster of an appetite.
Tucking into that, oh my, that was delightful.
Another childhood memory or two:
'Put...that...OUT!!!' (parents seeing a blazing inferno on the back garden stone path we had at the old house. Quite impossible to comply, as it was a thermite reaction, being watched by myself through welding goggles, so intense is the heat it gives off masses of UV, enough to damage eyes if more than glanced at, and in any case, one does not 'put out' thermite. Thermite goes out when the charge has finished burning. Which it does at several thousand degrees 'C, giving off a plume of sparks, and molten iron or steel, or other metals depending on the oxide used. It goes out when the reaction has no more reactants left to react. And not before. Water would be split into hydrogen and oxygen,and probably explode violently, likewise CO2 from a fire extinguisher would be split apart into it's constituent elements and provide fuel for a fire. There is only one single way to put it out and that is to disperse it so far and wide that the particles are no longer close enough to burn continually and each speck goes out in a second or two. Otherwise, it'll even burn under water once lit. They use it to weld railway track sections together, to cast steel, and to cut through steel, so hot does it burn. And was I going to go up to it and kick it to disperse it?
Kick something hot enough to near enough boil molten iron? you must be shitting me. Not a chance. They just had to wait until the blazing inferno had stopped flaring, sparking, and dribbling a slick of molten iron over the back garden path.
Or the great shout of 'are you alright' up the stairs of the old house, when my old man had built me my first lab benches, in my bedroom.
The house mains breakers had all tripped, plunging the house into darkness and shutting down every single electrical item that didn't rely on batteries. Accompanied by a colossal great BOOM!!!!, and my diving for cover, as the vase, with two carbon rods fitted through holes drilled in the sides, and in which had been poured caustic soda, liquefied, molten, at several hundred degrees 'C with a blowtorch, filled to the top, and connected to a plug, which I'd modified with a slug of lead, cast for the purpose and the last bits hammered into shape to force it in, the other bit of the plug straight into the mains, and me diving out of the way, wearing goggles, rubber boots and gloves and carrying a lengthened broom handle, used to poke the mains on.....not realizing DC, not AC current was needed, resulting in a sodding huge CRACK! noise, a lot of swearing fit to wake the dead, and me running like hell out of range, of the torrential plume of molten caustic, blasted up all over the ceiling, and elsewhere in my room, singing lots of areas of carpet, and burying a fair lot of vase-shrapnel in the wooden bed-frame and into the walls....I was fine enough, although my mom was daft enough to ask if I'd seen her vase or knew where it might be a day or two later...she really ought to have put two and two together and realized she'd never see that vase ever again.
You hear your son create a MASSIVE thumping great BOOM!!!! in his bedroom, see him dressed in rubber boots, elbow-length rubber gloves, wearing goggles, and carrying a broom handle, ducking out of the bedroom the moment the power was turned on, as the mains breakers trip and shut power down to the entire house, plus a sound like shattering ceramic shards peppering the walls, celling, embedding themselves into the wall and bed frame, a lot of swearing, and smell a mixture of the odour of copper wire that's just been frazzled to oxide in a matter of microseconds as well as plastic insulation flaming and giving off acrid fumes...and a day, maybe two later, you ask where your flower vase is......really now, even a neurotypical ought to know better than to voice the question as to where it is, or have I seen it....it ought to be blatantly obvious that said vase will never, EVER be seen again, once the son of the family has run out of the back door later with a pair of pliers in one hand and a black rubbish sack which goes not in the bin, but gets tied up and thrown over the wall of the back alley the rear of the house facing, while the kid returns holding only the heavy pliers, grinning widely....
Like you even NEED to ask....
Other fun childhood memories...
My first thermobaric charge in an abandoned car, whole enough for my test but not drivable.
Letting off a DIY RPG in a sewer storm drain. Not realizing the shockwave would rebound back from the far end and knock me senseless, vision whited out, ears ringing like church bells, knocking me backwards,
Hunting for conkers in the trees to play with, using a pistol-grip miniaturized grenade launcher while other kids used thrown sticks.
They got a few down every several throws...I just blasted them down in showers due to the huge shockwave from the TNT and booster charge in the shells, dropping out of the trees like sharply-spiky heavy rain,
Me and a friend as real young kid, we were playing about, setting fire to the dry grass of this field, only, instead of the little bits of fire we planned, the whole thing turned into a whopper of a firestorm and spread to the back of the nearby college. As we left, we saw a LOT of fire tricks screaming down the road and pulling into the college. THAT was unintentional, both of us thinking 'oooohhhh boy.....we really done it now....'
Playing with some local kid, going up a local disused railway track, where some unknown guy had a fenced compound made of tall metal sheet, always locked. And my blowing the lock off with a copper pipe full of explosives, each time he put on a new padlock, we'd go up there and I'd blast it off, buggering with his head. One of the few times I ever saw the lock after, it had literally been flattened, as if it were made of plastic and had been smashed repeatedly with a sledgehammer
A bit naughty, but oh well. Kids will be kids. And don't they all go through that 'weeee...lets blow shit up!!!' phase? everything from dropping 'airbomb' fireworks (like bangers but near a foot long, souped up to fuck) into school suggestion boxes on the weekends when they are closed, dropping them down chimneys, occasionally blowing up toilets with pipe-bombs, strapping a personally-invented slow-but-superintense-burning wax-bound plasticized incendiary composition to deodorant cans, acetylene tanks strapped to oxygen cylinders....
First time I ever prepared some white phosphorus, writing with it on a stick, on paper in the dark, seeing it glow bright lurid green,before it burnt through the paper.
Building my first shoulder-fired rocket launcher.
First time making TNT, manage to partially oxidize the toluene to benzaldehyde in the process and FLOOD my room with an overpowering scent of marzipan and cherry bakewell tarts, sweet and delicious smelling, my entire bedroom, absolutely gorgeous scent.
Quite a lot of escapades I dare not even mention.
Does 19 count as childhood? if so, the most wonderful memories of my entire life:
Going to a paintball game, where this classically autistic girl literally launched herself at me like a shell from a high-caliber naval cannon, stopping very briefly to knock the crap out of someone for getting into the way, ran over, threw me into a tree and slammed into me full-force, shoved her tongue down my throat as far as she could get it, and kept it there until I almost passed out for the second time, the first being when she whacked me into the tree trunk, leaving me seeing stars.
And somewhat after she told me I was hers, and she was my G/F, told me her name, and we just went from there, getting on like a flamethrower in a petrol refinery. A little later, found out she was only 14, and I'm not quite sure how long it was since she turned 14 either, but hey by that time, less than a week later, I'd already proposed to her, and damned if I was going to call it off due to her age. Hell no. Curvy, Kanner's, long black hair, the CUTEST spazzy-as-hell sounding thing she did with her voice when she'd shout 'HiiiIIIiiiiiiiiIII---*my name*..I can't describe it, just the spesh-sounding way she made it sound, sent shivers down my spine, her voice in general, she just..made go all warm and squishy inside
sexiest voice EVER. Just all round gorgeous,warm, loving, kind, a good person all round, absolutely lovely girl.
The day she first took me home, me feeling nervous as hell, knowing the age difference, her mom looking at me sideways so to speak.
Or the day I very first that spesh-sounding way she'd scream my name as I would hers, and we'd run from opposite ends of the road, belting it down there towards each other as fast as we could and slam full tilt into each other, lifting one another up and spinning each other in our arms, to dissipate part of the force and just being so happy to see each other.
Or one time, in the FOULEST weather you ever did see, wind a full on hell-storm gale, so strong we could barely stand, holding on to each other to stop from falling or going rolling down the street, LITERALLY, no joking, it was that strong, and raining, cold, miserable, but we were happy, she'd held on tight to me, linking one arm each round a lamp post, giving me the cover of her coat (and foxy lil' autie body too
) so I could skin up a joint of skunk, which, along with a big bottle of cheap cider, we took to the straight big round metal tube of a kiddie's play-park jungle gym type thing, to curl up all over each other, pass the doob between each other, and swig cider together, out of the wind, and snuggling up tightly to keep each other warm. All sleepy from the herb and cider, and snuggly warm from being wrapped round each other's bodies, two lovers, admittedly way, way under age, but two fiancee's madly in love, making the best of the filthy environment, because we had each other, and nothing else mattered whatsoever, but that we each made the other happy and kept each other comfy.
Or being asked by my folks 'WHY, is there a large slick of molten lead oozing across the garden path, glowing nearly white hot...'
Again..just don't ask.
