Long before Uncle John became known as Crazy uncle John, he did some pretty crazy things.
Casting my minds eye back to my childhood, I can remember such delights as him placing a pillow on top of a slightly ajar door so that it would fall onto the next person to enter the room. In this case it was my mother, carrying a plate of spaghetti bolognese, which received the pillow and got uncle John a telling off of great magnitude.
Childhood, or at least my childhood, was pretty good fun with uncle John around. He showed me stuff like how to ink dots onto the page of paperback books so that when you flicked through it looked like the dot was moving. He told me all about the Gemini and Apollo missions with all the intensity that I believed he had been there to witness each blast off. Add to that launching water/air propelled rockets in the park across the road and we have one cool uncle. Into the bargain, he also showed me how to make Hydrogen with a couple of bits of copper wire and a Scalectrix transformer at some point along the way. Not your conventional slippers and pipe uncle by any means.
The particular incident from the title came one lazy afternoon when I had stolen myself away in the attic to read uncle John’s collection of Mad magazines. Whether he still has them or not, I don’t know, but the collection was awesome and although I didn’t always get the gags, I appreciated the way they were put together and the crazy stuff between the covers. Each issue would end with a folding scene on the back cover – most of which had only been partially folded and I was so worried about ruining uncle John’s magazines that I would carefully push the folding points together, trying not to let them crease, before taking a best guess at the odd scene it was depicting. But I digress.
There I am, up the loft, when uncle John comes up to work on some stuff. Not sure what, but I think he was moving boxes around or something – tidying up. After a while of my inane 8 or 9 year old style chatter, uncle John produced a glass cylinder from one of the boxes he was moving around.