Ronaldo47

I wonder if the summit has lowered enough to make the old tunnel useable again?!

I don't know if birds such as Canada Geese defecate in the canals: they certainly leave plenty of their visiting cards on the banks.

"Dogs are clever." When I was a child, we lived in an upstairs flat which did have its own garden. On some mornings, before we had been downstairs to let them out, one of our cats used to use our toilet, carefully balancing itself on the seat (but of course couldn't operate the flush!). The other used to use the coke bucket.

Pre-Covid, Private Eye reported a similar situation with a Northern local authority that had contracted with a power generation company to supply them with enough incineratable rubbish for them to generate at least a certain amount of electricity. Before making this agreement they had had an excellent record in the proportion of waste recycled. It was found that the residual waste had too low a calorific value for them to meet their contractual obligations, so they had to make up the shortfall using some of the plastic that they used to recycle.

When I visited the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales in 1976, the gents toilet was home to one of their exhibits, a gents urinal consisting of a bale of straw stood on end with a funnel pushed in the top. Visitors were invited to use it instead of the conventional urinals that were also provided! When it had been in use for long enough, the urine-soaked straw would be used as fertiliser. It was suggested installing your own in a quiet corner of your garden. My recollection is that it didn't pong, unlike the typical gents today, where fitting the automatic flushing tanks with motion sensors to save water means that many do not flush sufficiently frequently to remove urine from the channel or bowl before it starts to break down, and have to be provided with perfumed blocks to disguise the stink. At one place where I worked, I occasionally used the gents on a floor mainly occupied by ladies. It used to be ok, but after the motion sensor valve was installed, in order to stop it stinking to high heaven, I put an old jug by the handbasins and used it to manually flush the urinal after every use.

When our club used to hire a couple of boats for holidays in the 1970's, the evening ritual on the way back from the pub was that the men would pee against the towpath fence or hedge, saving the loos on the boats for the ladies. We did wonder if that accounted for the luxurious growth of the nettles! I remember run-off from farms initially being blamed for the high level of nitrates etc. in one of the Norfolk Broads. However, a proper scientific investigation showed that the actual cause was the droppings of the large number of aquatic birds using it.

When I needed a set of brushes for our elderly electric lawnmower, spares were unavailable. As we are fortunate in still having a local electrical white goods repair shop that sells spares, I took the remains of the old brushes in on the offchance. They didn't have an exact match, but I was able to buy a set that was slightly bigger in all dimensions to cut down to size. Carbon brushes are quite soft and can be readily rough-cut using a junior hacksaw and then finished to size by rubbing on a piece of abrasive paper.

That was how the Bickerton qualified for free transport on any train in the 1980's. It had to be totally enclosed in its carry bag to be allowed on a train in rush hour as an item of luggage. On one occasion a ticket collector at Liverpool Street who had just refused entry to a passenger with a folding cycle that was not enclosed in a carry bag, was going to do the same to me. I pointed out that mine was in its carry bag, so he let me pass. I think the rules for trains may have been relaxed since then, if only for the reason that you rarely see ticket collectors at stations these days. As a student in the 1960's I had to buy a ticket at the child fare to take my bike on the train to college, but in those days, trains had guards vans with luggage space for bikes.

Now that we have left the EU, do Brits need any documentation to be able to sail on French canals?

Silicone is a homogenous viscous substance. Automotive grease is a mixture of a hydrocarbon oil and a soap whose job is to make the oil stay put. As noted above, it is the runny oil component of grease that leaks. The viscous soap component stays put.

The bike didn't see much use when boating with my children, but when it was just myself and my wife, it saw frequent use on flights of locks when there were no other boaters around. While the lock we were in was filling/emptying, I could cycle ahead to the next lock to open paddles to empty/fill it, cycle back to lock us out, and cycle ahead again to open the gates of the next lock so my wife could go straight in. A great time-saver.

My vintage Bickerton folder's 10" and 12" wheels usually coped with untarmacked tow paths unless they were really bad, when its light weight meant it was easy enough to be carried over bad patches.

And with the engine removed and stripped down ( I had plenty of practice), the cylinder block, which was lighter than the crankshaft, could be taken to the engine reconditioners for a head skim on the carrier of my push-bike! But to return to the original topic, it's not just a matter of wavelength, LED bulbs are not normally suitable for replacing tungsten bulbs in fittings like the one in the photo that use refractive elements to determine beam configuration, because the refractive elements will have been designed for the essentially point source and omidirectional light emission characteristics of a filament located at a standardised distance with respect to the lamp base. Not only is it not possible to make a compact omnidirectional LED light source that replicates an incandescent tungsten filament, the electonics and their heat sinks that are required to power a LED occupy too much space to fit between a lamp base and the required point of light emission at the standardised distance. That is why you find that many mains LED candle bulb replacements are longer than the tungsten bulbs they have replaced, often protrude beyond their shades rather than lying inside them, and throw little light towards their bases. .