We used to have a lot of fun posting my mother's baking beans down an old copper heating pipe that had been fixed as a handrail on the stairs. One child at the top, putting the beans into the hole; one at the bottom with a bowl to catch them as they came flying out, having made the most satisfactory melodic rattling noises on their journey down.

Sometimes a bean came to rest at the bottom without actually emerging from the right-angled fitment on the end of the pipe, and then the next bean would propel it out from behind and you'd get two at once...