'The man was a military enthusiast who found the shell while clearing out, but somehow "tripped" and fell onto the 57mm piece of army ordnance that landed him in hospital, according to The Sun.'
Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode of the proctologist.
> Cosmo Kramer: Have you ever met a proctologist? Well, they usually have a very good sense of humor. You meet a proctologist at a party, don't walk away. Plant yourself there, because you will hear the funniest stories you've ever heard. See, no one wants to admit to them that they stuck something up there. Never! It's always an accident. Every proctologist story ends in the same way: "It was a million to one shot, Doc. Million to one!"
Kind of reminds me of penile fractures, which can only occur while you have an erection, making one sometimes suspect that what the victim says they were doing when the injury occurred does not quite match what they were actually up to.
See this 1988 "The Straight Dope" column for some examples [1].
"The [57mm] 6-pounder first saw action in May 1942 at the Battle of Gazala. It made an immediate impact on the battlefield as it was able to penetrate any enemy tank then in service."
The enemy tanks are not the only thing it’s able to efficiently penetrate it would seem. Also, why are British local news sites universally abysmal to use?
More seriously - I'm just wondering how many locals remember somebody showing them their collection, and now frantically trying to remember whether they touched it.
Just as the only muons that reach deep-underground neutrino detectors are of very high energy, only the most-upvotable non-tech stories (think Omicron breaking news and mortars-up-the-bum) make it to the front page.
The weirdest thing about this is that this is not the first time I heard about explosives from WWII finding their way up someone's behind in peacetime.
Particularly seems to be especially prevalent in the UK. (I attribute that odd statistical outlier to a higher than average number of WWII projectiles laying around and a cultural propensity to walking around sans pants)
colour me skeptical