25 years ago my life revolved around a big group of friends, we skated, we partied, we drank a bit, we were united in the belief that our parents were the bad guys out to ruin our lives with revision schedules. Easter was over, exams were yet to begin, we were 16, life was good, life was for skating.
Now we are 41, our children meet in the same parks, many of them now 16, comparing tales of how 'gay' their parents are, because we are nagging them to revise for the final school exams they will take in 3 or 4 weeks time. Like most of the 41 year old parents I am trying hard to pretend that I was an absolute angel at 16, of course I never went out! Parties? No way, not til July! Drinking? Who me? Noooo, never. She can see right through me, I know she can.
2 of our group will never know the quandaries we face as parents, never experienced the big, bad world of work, never sat those exams that actually, secretly, without telling each other, we had all revised pretty damn hard for.
2 of our group were chatting in a garden shed one day, not any old garden shed, this one had been done out as a den, it had power, beanbags, a stereo...... and a lava lamp. Nobody will ever know exactly what happened, but the lava lamp got knocked over, got broken and in a small confined area the fumes had nowhere to go.
On the 27th April 1983 Ian Kitts and Michael Munns inhaled the fumes from the broken lava lamp, and died when the wax particles filled their airways making it impossible for them to continue breathing.
Their parents have both written entries in the 'In Memoriam' section of the Family Announcements section of the local paper:
"Time does not dim our memory and our love grows ever stronger. They are always in our hearts and we think of them every day."
Of all my friends from this era of my life these are probably the 2 that I do think of most often, always picturing them as 16 year olds, about to embark on the paths taking them to adulthood, they never got there.............. I wonder what they would be doing now if they had.
We don't have lava lamps in our home.
For Ian and Michael, hopefully heaven truly is a halfpipe.
I had no idea the fumes would be lethal from a broken lava lamp.
I suspect, or at least hope, that in the intervening 25 years the formula has been changed to make them less dangerous, and, in fairness, I have never actually heard of the same thing happening to anyone else. Still wouldn't ever have one or allow my kids to have one though.
Being on the opposite side of The Channel, I'm sure you can appreciate that we spent our pre-exam Summer on the beach "revising"...!
There were, as far as I remember, a couple of guys in my year at school that passed away before we finished. One in another class was a tall guy who had some kind of heart condition and one who was in my class was a tragic waste as he died after wrapping the car he was joyriding in around a lamp post.
As for "dens" we had a bunch of the growing up, mostly in the hedgerows and bushes around the area. The strangest of which was in a tunnel that channeled a local brook through our part of town, about half a mile under a road and some houses! Had to almost crawl along it at one point and halfway down there were sediment banks that we used for keeping candles and stuff. You know, this was twenty years or so ago, but I bet if I was brave enough to go down there today, all that stuff would still be there!
That's a really sad story, Viv. I used to love lava-lamps. I had several back in those days, but when I heard about several deaths from the fumes (possibly about your friends), I got rid of them, they were too much of a risk. Lovely tribute to them, Viv :-))
I had no idea the fumes would be lethal from a broken lava lamp. 
