The curious incident of the flare in the night time.
Many years ago my younger brother nicked a naval flare from a boat and kept it in a drawer in his room for months. Being young and bored my mates and I thought it'd be a jape to steal it, launch it and see what happens. We waited until dark and climbed onto the roof of the local pavilion. The foot-long plastic tube was handed to our somewhat gullible pal and waited whilst he read the instructions out loud to himself and carried them out.

"Unscrew End Caps, Pull lever down, then push lever u..."

There then followed an ear-splitting whoosh accompanied by a huge cloud of foul white smoke as the projectile shot off toward the heavens. A split second before he'd launched it my other mate and I had (quite sensibly as it turned out) jumped down and started running like the clappers.

Somewhat panicked and now blinded by smoke, our gullible pal jumped off the roof, twisting his ankle and hobbling away from the scene as fast as he could. He caught us up very shortly after as there was absolutely fuck all point in trying to hide anyway.

The flare had lit up a sleepy area of Norfolk about a mile across, as if it was the midday sun.

As we were inland, no Sea King helicopters attended. In fact, nobody other than the three of us mentioned seeing it. ever. But then, that's Norfolk for you.
(toomanydecibels has bleeding ears on, Mon 23 Jul 2007, 12:48, Reply)