When I was younger it must be said that I was more than a little bit crazy with some of the antics I got up to. Crazy in that I just did things that were completely outlandish and nothing to do with my mental health which in recent times has become more pressing. The story I present today is one of those crazy moments from my younger days.

It was a cold, dark January evening, a typical winter's night in England and I was hanging out with three of my mates; Lee, Mark and Shane. We headed off to the local park and were actually a bit bored when we stumbled upon a tree. It was standing alone in the middle of a large patch of grass and clearly dead.

Somebody said, "Let's set fire to it." I am sure it wasn't my suggestion, but I was up for it too and so whoever said it was pretty irrelevant.

So, one of the others tried to set fire to it with some matches and given the damp it was clearly not going to go up. Disappointed we left the tree, but were more determined than ever to burn it down. So, we headed off to Ady's house. At the time Ady was our youth pastor. Despite the fact that it was well after 8 and maybe even 9 he, as hospitable as ever, invited us in for a warm drink. While he was making it in the kitchen we ferreted around his living room until we found what we were looking for - some dry old news papers and a small bottle of white spirit or turps, the latter would be a perfect accelerant and the paper would provide some short-lived kindling. 

Honestly, I can't remember how we got out of his house with what we effectively stole, after drinking tea and spending about half an hour there. We probably had the bottle in a pocket and newspapers up our coats.

We were back in the park and before the tree some ten minutes later and so now the fun begun. We took the newspapers apart and scrunched them up into loose strips and placed them around the base of the tree before Lee had a go at setting the fire, but he just couldn't get it going. I quickly shoved him out of the way with a gruff "Let me do it!"

Now out of the four of us there I was probably the one who was considered to be the least "crazy" and yet I was the one who took the lead. The thing was that back in those days if I was in one of those "up for anything moods" I pretty much will do anything without fear and with no concept of consequence - fortunately I never pushed the boat out too far. This was probably about as far as it got tbh.

Within seconds I got a small fire going at the base of the tree and then less than a minute later the whole thing went up and the header image - despite being AI has captured the moment fairly accurately. I could even go as far as to say, down to this that it is the best AI image I have been able to produce so far.

Suddenly one of the others saw a curtain twitching in the window of a nearby house. We scarpered, and even swapped and changed our appearance and split up into two pairs as anybody would be looking for a group of four. It was maybe 20 minutes or so later when we heard a fire engine ("Uncle Den" as we called them in those days due to them being made by a company called Dennis) approach.

Honestly, this did make me feel bad because it was dealing with something stupid which meant that it wasn't available for a call of greater urgency. I wouldn't go as far as to say I felt guilty - that wasn't me in those days - although I did develop more of a conscience when I matured.

It probably wasn't much later that we went to our respective homes and the next day we found ourselves gathered once more at Ady's We may have been idiots, but we were honest ones and we told Ady exactly what we had done, but he didn't believe us. It was only when we talking about it with another friend, Matt, a week or so later that Ady said, startled. "You mean you really did burn that tree down?"

We all just laughed and Matt, who hadn't been there, but had gone by the next day, described what he has seen. The fire had reduced the once mighty pine tree - even though it was already dead by the time we got to it - to just a blackened stump no more than knee high.

As always stay safe and well my friends