Me and a few mates used to play "hide and seek tag/tick" and you're probably assuming we were about 6 or 7. We were 18/19.

You're now probably thinking "that sounds awfully childish for blokes in their late teens" but we had my mate's 300 acre farm, a variety of vehicles, and we were armed. I honestly think you could sell the experience to stag parties.

Anyway me and a mate are a "team" with three others on the other team hunting us. We get a five minute head start, opt for a small van in my mate's yard, knowing they'll instantly know that's what we took, and go looking for it. So we drive it to one far corner of his farm then track back up a series of drainage ditches (that fortunately are empty enough we can stay low without getting into the water) on foot for about half a mile to the other side of the farm.

This is properly exciting stuff, you really get into it - every noise, every engine sound, you assume it's your opposing team.

We pop up for a bit and look through a pair of binoculars and spot one of our mate's head bobbing up and down walking through a field of tall grass. He's going to end up at the end of the ditch we're in, so we make a break for it to the other corner of the field, where there's a big hedge, then a small dry ditch, then the fence of a big house that adjoins his land.

We're camping out here for a bit keeping an eye on them, when behind us, across the large lawn of said house, three dogs come bounding around. Not three Yorkshire Terriers or Springer Spaniels. A German Shephard, a Rottweiler, and a Doberman, barking like mad. This is not a chainlink or wire fence either, it's simply posts every few feet then a horizontal piece of wood at the top, and one in the middle. The dogs will have zero issue getting through.

My mate, and I still give him stick to this day, crawls under the hedge, snagging himself on barbed wire, then as I shout for him to pull me through, he runs off.

I'm trying to get through myself, then something grabs my leg. I'm shouting "the dogs got me!" in full panic when I hear over the barking, another mate pissing himself laughing and realise it's actually his hands, not a dog. I'm out of the game, but utterly terrified. The dogs actually stopped short, and just lay down on the grass watching us.

Mate who ran off later turns up bleeding a bit from his cheek, other mate had been watching from just further up the hedge having spotting us, and shot him with a BB gun when he saw him running off. Way closer than the rules normally allowed, but he was pissed off he'd abandoned me.

Still scared of big dogs to this day, and I assume it's because of that.