h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Reading this reminds me of one of the 'crazy schemes' from my yoof.

My friends and I were always making and doing things in my garden, and one day we hit upon the idea of paper recycling. "With all this newspaper going to waste" we reasoned, "why don't we recycle it and make into...".

We never did work out what to make it into, so we decided it was art or something.

What we did was this: we took a length of guttering into my Base, and balanced the nozzle of a hose at one end with the assistance of a brick. We tore newspapers into strips and added them to the guttering while water gushed down it into a bucket at the other end, covered with a wire mesh. We pulped the paper with sticks as it was sluced toward the mesh, and the ink was washed out. Then peeled the paper from the mesh and soaked it in buckets of ink (pen ink, mostly, but also other assorted stuff we found that I can't seem to remember) before ineptly moulding it into shapes and leaving them in the sun to dry.

We considered selling the paper mounds along with 'medallions' we had made by flattening 2p's with hammer, but never got round to it.