When I was a kid, me and my beavers group got into the local paper because we did something.
I’ve got no idea what we did, but we got printed and as a 7 year old that was pretty huge.
Life never got better.
A very long time ago, a large group of us had a night of drinking around 3 miles from our small town. With a drunken adolescent sense of mob mentality, a sprinkle of rebellion, and a bucket load of mindless teenage stupidity, we descended upon the town to cause some trouble. We wanted to put our stealth skills to the test, and devised a plot to separate into multiple teams of 4. The name of the game was Gnome Hunt, and the aim was a heist that would make Danny Ocean shit his pants.
We agreed on a time limit of 2 hours where we would rendezvous back at the threshold of the town, count up scores, and fade back into the rural night from whence we emerged.
Quickly, the game evolved from simple gnomes, as drunken brains decided larger scores would net more points, so why settle?
After the 2 hours had passed we all met up again with our prizes. We had no scoring mechanic, of course, so we just all decided “good game”, shook hands, and sauntered back into the dark countryside.
Left behind, on a wall at the entrance to a housing estate, was a glorious display of all sorts of garden ornaments, arranged in a way that would make B&Qs seasonal team take pause.
The following weeks were a blaze of entertainment. The local paper had a photo of the full display, and a piece written as to the mystery of it all. Locals played along, with “wanted” and “have you seen this gnome?” Posters put up around town. All in all, the town seemed to enjoy a good laugh at the whole thing. None the wiser that it was simply reckless abandon from stupid, yet polite, drunken teens.
I got in the paper for googling “seven year old beavers”
Me, waaay back in 1976…
Me and my sister were chosen to give Princess Anne flowers outside the High Court in Edinburgh when I was a kid. I liked that day, because I got to go in a jail cell
Local paper, local tv news and radio 4 for organising a toad road crossing when the colony turned out to be the largest recorded in the UK one year.
Local tv when I was the pagan chaplain for some local prisons,
National tv news for a couple of Greenpeace protests.
My elbow featured on the cover of Time magazine for another protest once.
I appeared in some Portillo documentary or other, and briefly in a couple of episodes of Coast, all because of where I worked at the time.
