Ninjas

Satan oscillate my metallic sonatas.

This little phrase, that trips lightly from the tongue, is reportedly the longest palindrone in the english language.

After recounting my childhood, canned fizzy drink incident I started remembering other moments of prepubescent foolishness and idiocy. Some are amusing just to me, some are the usual fare of growing up and some did cause consternation.

I grew up in a rural environ, on a reasonable sized lifestyle block. We had a creek complete with brown trout, eels and koura, in the garden lurked bantams. There were, scattered around the property, dogs, a siamese cat, chickens, ducks, incredibly stupid pet lambs that became moron sheep who came to live in the freezer, bobby calves and steers, ponies and horses, and a dairy farm next door. In that space, and the neighbouring farms, I ran wild.

My cousin lived nearby and we engaged in the sort of scheming and activities that small boys thrive on. There was the creek to play in, along and on, trees to climb, bulls to be scared of, animals to wrestle with, cowpats to throw. In this sort of place you'd imagine that indoors was a place generally ignored. Most of the time it was.

My father had a large workshop, with a large bench, lots of woodworking tools and odds and sods. We were allowed to go in there, but there were very strict orders about the use of tools and what we could, or couldn't, use. The two of us generally only went in to try and better the home made boats that we raced down the creek.

One particular day we were bored, and spurred on by the looming April Fools Day, I hatched a plan to get the upper hand on my father. I was still smarting from the ignomy of the previous April Fools morning when my father had woken me to tell me that it had snowed heavily. I leapt from my bed and threw open the curtains to see this glorious white scene. But there wasn't any snow, not even a frost, nothing unusual at all, the lawn, trees and bushes looking exactly like any other early autumn morning.

In the workshop of my father one particular March day the plan took shape. As was the normal fashion, when either my cousin or I had a plan of mischief, the other participant was willing and enthusiastic, this time was no different. The plan was to glue various random off cuts of timber to the bench, maybe nail a few down as well for good measure as a strangely inept April Fools Day prank. This we did with a sixteen ounce hammer and a bottle of PVA.

We stood admiring our handy work, when I noticed the vice, a good woodwork vice, faced with timber. A lightbulb went off in my mind and I grabbed the PVA, squirted a decent amount onto the faces of the vice and wound it shut. Then we went back outside and carried on doing what small boys do with sticks and dirt and creeks.

April Fools Day passed uneventfully, nothing was said by my father and I didn't want to ruin the surprise. Days passed, then weeks, nothing was said. Time passed and my cousin and I moved on to new escapades and forgot about that act of devilry.

Some years later, maybe my late teens, at a family gathering, my father asked my cousin and I, in front of the assembled family, if we remembered all those years ago glueing timber to his bench. There was laughter all round, then he mentioned the vice, still laughing. He recounted how he had come to discover the crime, how angry he was, furious even, how he had to carefully cut down through the middle of the glued faces of the vice to be able to separate it and then remove and replace the glued, scarred faces. Then he saw the funny side of it, and decided he wouldn't give the culprits the satisfaction of knowing they had got one over him, so he stayed silent and we forgot until that fateful family gathering.

All well and good, except that he made me realise that I still hadn't got the upper hand in the April Fools Day battle. Never one to let sleeping dogs lie I fixed that score properly that next year, and, due to a happy coincidence, the particular stunt I pulled had an effect far greater than I ever envisioned. The outcome of this stunt was such that there have never been any further April Fools Day skirmishes from either side.

The stunt in question, I'll save that for another day.