There seems to have been a post lost from me.

Firstly, it had never occurred to me that my title referred to that old expression about the simple inbred types found in ancient rural environments. Kicks self for personal idiocy.

Secondly, the Y-shaped device with elastic or similar is indeed what I meant. I didn't see it, so don't know whether it was a homemade one, or the more high-tech versions sold in fishing tackle shops for spreading bait. The arm movements are quite distinctive, though, and different from the fabric round-the-head still-used-in-the same-area-David-did movements. The language confusion is one of those pond things.

Thirdly, I taught for a year in a school where one of the teachers, as a child, playing war up on the hills around Dover, had had a disagreement with some sort of left over military kit, as a result of which one of his fingers was a joint or two shorter than standard issue. I'm not sure if it was an explosive or a bit of barbed wire, but it was boys'games harm.

Fourthly, I was always envious of boys' school science, which included the Dartford chemistry teacher setting off a Thermite reaction with an airgun in the playground, Dover grammar boys making small devices that involved a pair of coins with something explosive in between, put on steps to alarm the unwary, and making odd mixtures of chemicals to produce dense clouds of smoke under the benches. Also of my own science teacher, a sole sister among brothers, who in her youth had fun shooting old vacuum filled light bulbs with an air gun to implode them.

I don't know why I was such a wetblanket the other night!

Penny