When i was very much younger...
About 14 or so, back in the mid-80's, and at school in a small town, we used to do the usual routine of hanging around in the evenings and getting drunk on cheap cider and thunderbirds in a graveyard. To liven weekends up, we used to have an informal competition on fridays, where we all chucked a quid or so into a pot, and the person who stole the 'best' thing and bought it back to the graveyard just before the offy shut got to spend it all on booze.

It started off relatively innocently enough, with garden gnomes, traffic cones and the odd roadsign etc, with the stuff usually even getting put back at the end of the night, until it got out of hand.

One evening, i came back (with something like a sack of spuds in a wheelbarrow, or something equally pointless like that) to find that someone had stolen an entire, freshly laid turf lawn from some poor sod's garden, and re-laid it neatly on the car park that backed onto our meeting place, complete with table, chairs and an umbrella. That made me take it up a notch.

The final straw, after which we had to call it off, was when i was prowling a building site, looking for something interesting, and noted that some dozy prat of a builder had left the keys still in a lovely, bright yellow JCB. Seeing a golden opportunity to win a bottle of cheap vodka, i decided that'd be good for a win, started it up and swiftly learned to drive it. Badly. Very badly as it turned out, even for a 14 year old, JCB's are bloody complicated things to drive.

After driving it through through the fence, and onto a road, i got it all the way to the car park, trailing bits of chainlink fence, before not managing to stop it in time, and embedding three feet into the graveyard wall. After that, we had to start meeting somewhere else, as that car park had a police car sat in it for weeks afterwards...

I won the vodka though, and for years afterwards, was known as 'the guy that nicked the JCB'.
(dieselmonkey, Fri 8 Oct 2010, 15:52, Reply)