Boom!

I got blown up once when I was younger. It was only a small explosion but they're a bit like bears – size is irrelevant past a certain point. Specifically, the point at which you find yourself in a small room filled with smoke, deaf, and in possession of an extra hole that wasn't there a few seconds ago.

It all started when a friend of mine got hold of a selection of firework gunpowder. You can probably work out the rest but stick with me. I can't remember where it came from but we had loads. Not just quantity but variety. I was always (and still am) the sciencey one so I set about trying out batches to see what it all was. There was propellant, different colours, sparkly stuff. A few hours experimenting soon separated about 10 or so different types of boom.

To start with we made small things: roman candles the size of your thumb, rockets made from tin foil cases formed around biro lids. Amazingly, it all worked. The rockets were the best. They'd fly up about six feet and go pop. Then another friends arrived. Immediately he started to convince us of a better plan: stick everything in a toilet roll tube and make the biggest explosion possible. Looking back now that was a mistake. We crafted a doomsday device that exuded menace, much in the way you'd expect half a pound of crudely packed explosive might. The IRA would have been proud. We carried our deadly baby like a new messiah and planted at the top of the garden. We lit the fuse. We ran.

The most absolutely, breathtakingly enormous nothing happened. Cowering from the kitchen (behind a big plate glass window for added protection) we waited. It was raining and after about half an hour, having convinced ourselves nothing was going to happen, we stopped hiding and I went to my car to get some cigarettes. When I came back, there was the tube, being carried in cautiously by my idiot friends as they took the lid off. To get the full effect of the next bit you have to imagine it's all happening like a slow-mo movie scene, full of drawn out cries of “Nooooooo!” and dives through the air. It wasn't like that. There was just a great big fucking bang and the collective opinion between the three of us that the last thirty seconds had been a mistake.

There's a blank bit next. Suddenly, we were all in a room filled with thick white choking smoke, unable to hear anything beyond a high pitched ringing. There was a hole in the table and another in the front of my jeans, about three inches below my knee, leading to an exit 'round the back. Oddly enough, I vaguely remember looking lazily behind me for whatever had caused it before I thought to check myself. Then it all kicked in a bit and I started desperately clawing at my ankle to survey the damage. It was light - a small graze and a cut caused by a fragment of the plastic base used to stand the tube up. It could have been a lot worse. To this day, though, my balance and hearing still fritzes out occasionally, although the scar healed completely. Amazingly, when the friend whose house it was told his dad why the table was pockmarked with shrapnel he just shrugged it off. I never told my parents.