Be Excellent To Each Other

Kids break things, intentionally or by accident. Maybe they want to see how they work or how they're put together. Or maybe they break stuff on purpose in a tantrum. There could be any number of reasons.

What do you remember breaking and what were the consequences?

I'll start.


For reasons that I'll never know, we had a mandolin at home when I was a nipper. None of my family could play it, as far as I know, and it wasn't hung on the wall as an ornament, so I don't know where it came from or why we had it. It was kept in my parents' bedroom.

Sometimes I would try to play it, just to make a noise I guess, and one day I was messing with it on their big double bed, but got fed up with it and just started tramploning on the bed, as it was very bouncy. I lost my balance, fell backwards and sat down hard on the mandolin, totally smashing its bowed back.

I was terrified that I'd be in a load of trouble, but I don't remember getting a bollocking.

My dad made a bodged job of putting it back together with Araldite epoxy resin, his adhesive of choice, but it looked a mess and was probably unplayable. I can't remember what happened to it in the end.

My cat and I were sitting in the family car, a red ford Sierra estate and pretending to drive it. I managed to figure out how to release the handbrake and the car rolled down the hill about 15 metres and crunched into the wall, the cat did a runner and so did I. I seem to remember being found behind a wall in a field some time later, they weren't even that angry by the time I was found so I guess the lesson is: run away!

I trust you blamed the cat.

I broke our top loader video player by putting a plastic spider in it. The guy who came to fix it fished it out and did the usual "I think this is the problem" while I was in the room with my mom. He sold me out big time.

I once accidentally burned down the garage by leaving something smouldering after I'd been reacreating Gerry Anderson style SFX sequences.

Ran a speaker magnet over the front of the big ol' TV, which made it go pretty colours. My parents had to pay someone to come out and fix it. To this day I'm pretty sure my mum thinks it was one of my many brothers.

(I don't think I did it deliberately, I was just pissing about with the magnet.)

Ohhh... I did this too! Ran a powerful magnet down the side of the telly.

We were at an airport waiting to go on a big family holiday. I must have been 8 or 9. My dad was very proud of his new hat. I spilt his coffee over it.

I was helping my old man at his workshop and we were rolling a car off the four-post lift. I was behind it, and it wasn't moving that fast, but when I tried to stop it I discovered I had oil on my shoes and the fucker didn't want to stop. Instead of bouncing off the padded garage roller door it pinned my leg between the door and it, and it ended up with a nice leg shape crushed into the rear.

It was a 1955 Maserati 300S.

You got run over and the car broke

Just a couple of million quid then?

My brother and I were playing the "go around the entire living room without using the floor". IE the sofas, furniture and ledges.

All of a sudden I heard this crack, and realised my brother had trod on my mother's glasses. This was a big deal at the time. So my brother hid them under the sofa but I couldn't stand the guilt and fessed. My mother was in tears, I felt so bad.

A few years later (I was about 10) I was out in the garden hitting practice golf balls. Those air things full of holes. I decided I wanted to hit a 1 wood with a real ball. IDK what the hell I was thinking. Any way I twatted it really hard, and it flew toward the houses behind ours. It then bounced off of the wall of the house and fired backward into the greeenhouse, smashing the glass. Again I couldn't stand the guilt so I told my mum and she took me over to apologise and made me pay for the glass out of my pocket money.

I won't go into all of the personal items I smashed in rage, but I will say that when my brother converted the living room to wooden floor whilst I was in the USA he found loads of clear plastic from SNES SN pro pads I'd smashed on the concrete fireplace whilst trying to pull of SFII moves. I smashed a lot of things in rage as a kid but always mine.

I think your mum would definitely know if it was one of your many brothers who came out to fix your TV.

Did you take turns at pretending to drive it?

Pffft, we've ALL made that kind of mistake, surely. Jetex capsules were great for that kind of thing.

My dad had pocket watch that he never used and that I sometimes played with. I damaged it somehow, possibly broke the glass, but I can't remember the exact damage, but I do remember hiding it under an armchair in panic, hoping it wouldn't be found and that it would be forgotten about. Eventually it was found and I did get a bollocking.

I also ripped the handles off the living room door by swinging on them. They only had piddling little screws in them, but I didn't know that at the time. Luckily my dad was able to screw them back on into undamaged bits of the door, covering the damaged screw holes, and I was banned from swinging on them.

My son broke one of our living room doors when he was in his teens and Mrs. W and I were away for a few days. Typically, the kids had a party without telling us and one of my son's mates locked him in the kitchen. All very funny for half a minute, but when he still wouldn't open the door my son punched a fist sized hole in one side of it. It was only a shitty cheap plywood door with carboard honeycomb inside. In a panic, he asked our neighbour if anything could be done to fix it, but it was fucked.

When we got home he'd stuck a poster of Tinky Winky over it.

The car was worth about five. Fortunately the panel dude owed us a favour.

This isn't something I broke, but that I made a mess of.

When I was about 8 my dad paid for my older sister's bedroom to be decorated, because like me in later years, he hated decorating.

The decorator had finished and left. A couple of hours later I went in to look at his handywork.

For no obvious reason, I leant on the newly glossed window sill, which I assumed would be fully dry. It wasn't, it was still tacky and I my hand slid a bit when I leant in it, pushing a screwed up handprint into it. It wasn't just a print, I'd managed to put a ridge in the paint making a real mess of it.

I panicked, but didn't try to fix it. My sister was understandably furious, and my dad wasn't pleased. But instead of waiting for it to fully dry and sanding it down to repaint, he made no attempt to fix it, so it stayed like that for several years until it was redecorated.

The sill under my french doors is like this because of my cat. She walked on the new gloss, the kids panicked and chased her off it.

One of our teachers at primary school was a bit of a dick towards us, and he used to play some golf game on the Archimedes in the classroom. We wiped magnets all over the disk.

Consequences - mild satisfaction when he was all puzzled why it wouldn't work any more.