A noise like approaching armageddon...
When I was a wee nipper, we used to play in an old abandoned plastics factory*. Much fun was had, lobbing plastic duck-heads at each other, sword fighting with plastic rods, pouring sacks of plastic chips on each other's heads from the dangling wreckage of upper floors, and attempting not to fall down gaping holes into the basement.

But the fun had to end eventually, and one day we heard that they'd started to demolish our fun palace. So that evening we headed over to have a look. This was the 1970s, when life was cheaper than it is now, so there was nothing to stop us wandering over the demolition site. The building was about half gone; the main part we could see still standing was an inner wall, which had only been half pulled down. On top we spied a loose block of masonry, maybe a metre square, which had been cracked loose but still stood, balanced on top of the wall. Naturally we started to rock it back and forward, hoping for a satisfactory crash when it fell, and entirely failing to consider that it might fall back onto us, rather than forwards over the wall.

But we managed to avoid getting squashed like Bernard Manning's wife, and the block teetered, wobbled, then finally dropped out of sight over the wall.

We were expecting something like CRAAASHHhhhh .... What we got was CRAAAASHHHhhhhhHHHSHHRRRRRROOOOOAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... It seemed to go on for ages; we instinctively did the "Awoooga Two Step", and were several streets away before the ungodly noise faded away. Ten minutes or so later, having hidden behind some bins, we cautiously headed back to the site.

A police car was there, the coppers looking rather puzzled. It seemed that, entirely spontaneously, about half of the remaining building - in fact, everything the other side of the wall, which turned out to have been one side of the central stairwell - had collapsed about three metres down a bank into what had been the basement.

I often wondered what the demolition workers made of it, the next day, when they found that most of their work had been done for them.

* The phrase "old abandoned" generates a strong compulsion to do a Scooby Doo joke, but I'll attempt to restrain myself.
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Fri 9 Nov 2012, 16:21, 2 replies)

Fuck yeah. The holy grail of kiddie destruction
"The chain reaction"

In our days smashing up derilict houses, we once got a whole gable end to collapse into the house, which took most of the first floor out on its way down.

The noisy ones are always the best too. If it was loud enough to make everybody spontaneously leg it, it was a good bit of work.

Ah, good times. Makes we want to go home and set fire to my house. Sigh.
(username failed moderation, Fri 9 Nov 2012, 16:48, closed)

This made me smile :)

( drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Tue 13 Nov 2012, 15:01, closed)