Wacky stuff you did as a kid; and what might you be up to were you born this past decade….

Are chemistry sets still sold for children or has H&S intervened? As soon as I learned about the Periodic Table I requested a chemistry set for Christmas and was delighted to open the package on Christmas morning. I was a year and a half younger than most of my class mates, and definitely maturity had not matched IQ. When aged 4 my uncle had died of prostate cancer, I had seen him in final days and had questioned was there any treatment afforded and what was it. My beleaguered mother had answered “cobalt was tried”, and the word osmotically be and part of my young inner lexicon, though not in my day-to-day vocabulary. Cobalt was in my chemistry set.

About that Christmas my grandmother was terminally ill with breast cancer, but with a positive outlook had a bit of living to do yet. I had the solution…. literally. As we walked from car to the hospital my Dad asked me “what’s that bottle of purple stuff sticking out of your pocket?” “It’s cobalt to try help Nana!” I explained. Now my father didn’t actually say “do you want to kill her here and now!” But he confiscated the liquid, informing me it was not medicine, but poison, and that only a doctor can prescribe the former.

The last bit of your post is making me duly nauseous.

Having read Dennis the Menace, my hero, in the Beezer, I took the idea to descend from rear bedroom (my father’s office) by umbrella parachute into garden but was thankfully stopped by my father.

Yeah, “stray” dogs were much more a feature of Dublin streets. And I remember the kids clinging onto the backs of lorries… and cars.

The church was another place of opportunity for mischief, and no better place than the forbidding aura of the RC church in the 1960s. As a very young child I would run onto the altar and disrupt the priest, would “give holy communion” with my toy petrol pump into the shoulders of pashioners to the words of “Corpus Christi”. The wise parish priest said to my mother that I was a “spirited” child and that it was better I was participating in my own way with the Mass rather than being totally dissociated with it.

Later I recruited a friend with a particularly good singing voice into church activities. There was an elderly professional opera singer who was a regular attendant at Sunday Mass, her voice very loud but had sung in better days. We (well I was the ring-leader) decided to try and out-loud her during hymns, not that we knew all the words. We might make those up along the way. The thing we had to compete with was the tremelo in her voice, so we threw that on with a trowel. The trick was not to start in full volume in parallel with her, but to ramp it up at the right moments. There were many glares from neighbouring Mass-goers, although some of them smiled and winked at us. We would often attend church separately to our parents, they being only too happy to know we we going at all, never mind the shenanigans we might get up to.

The theme of shops played large in my growing-up, was fascinated by them. Nowadays I would have been engaging in online sales of all sorts of my parents’ belongings. In the 60s I decided to turn the front windows (today it would have been Windows with a W instead) into a shop front. One time I put the family silver on display with price tags, much to my father’s horror. Another time I put my mother’s clothes on display in the front main bedroom window, with prices marked as well as big red on white SALE ON HERE! notices. My mother came to know only when a ding dong came on the door with a neighbour enquiring as to what was going on! 😂

As a kid I built tons of stuff. Cardboard boxes got converted into castles, mansions, train stations, vehicles, streetscapes. I and a friend had this dream of creating a glider which we reckoned we might convince one of our fathers to tow aloft with us on board.

Absolutely. Had a bee in my belly button home once.