Ronaldo47

Some 30 years ago we moored up at a spot where the well-used towpath was seperated from the canal edge by a couple of feet of verdant vegetation, including numerous saplings that provided fishing rods and bows and arrows for our young children. The grass was very long and overlapped the water. It was probably from this that we acquired a stowaway field mouse whose presence was detected by the grains of expanded polystyrene insulation that appeared on the dinette table, no doubt from where it was carving itself out a home, and a nibbled packet of instant mash. I found it in the food cupboard the next day and managed to dispatch it with a handy tin of baked beans.

It's also a good idea to remove your watch if it has a metal bracelet. A guy I used to know in the 1970's, accidentally badly burnt his wrist while feeling under his car's dashboard by managing to make a short circuit between 12V and chassis with his watch bracelet. The high current made the bracelet get very hot very quickly, causing serious burns around his wrist . When we met up some 10 years ago, I reminded him.of it, and he showed me the scars thaf he still had from the incident.

My camper can was short enough to fit a standard car park parking bay. Some of the current large SUVs have a bigger footprint.

Swan Vestas are certainly not what they were. As a schoolboy in the 1960's, we used to make miniature rockets from a Swan Vesta march and a piece of the heavy plasicised aluminium foil that Polo mints used to be wrapped in. You rolled the foil into a tube around the end of the match, slighly overlapping the head, and carefully formed a nozzle in rhe open end. You then balanced the match on the end of something, lit another match, and held it under the foil. After a few seconds there would be a sharp crack, and the match would fly across the room at speed, leaving a smoke trail behind it. It worked in the 1970's, but when I tried it in the 1980's, it just fizzed.

I used to have a high-top motor caravan (a Toyota Newlander) that, at around 8'6" high, was too tall for local garages, so I used to have it MOT'd at the local HGV MOT station, where they had a day for testing that class of vehicle once a fortnight. The vehicle was built on the Toyota Hi-Ace pickup truck chassis, and as part of the test, the tester inspected the interior to check that beds were present. He explained that, if it hadn't had beds, he couldn't have tested it as a motor caravan, and it would have had to have had the more stringent test applicable to a commercial vehicle. So on that criterion, the essential difference between a motor caravan and a van, is that one has beds and the other does not. The Camping and Caravanning Club administers various minimum facility sites. Some are licenced only for tents and not for use by caravans or motor caravans. In response to a query that was published in their magazine some years ago, it was confirmed that motor caravans were allowed on such sites, as long as you also had a tent and slept in that.

Someone on the radio last week observed that if you ask two lawyers for an opinion, you will get three different answers. .A lot depends on the facts of the case. Similar, but slightly different, factual circumstances can result in different outcomes, as can changes in the law. Shortly after we moved here, a new neighbour moved in across the road, bringing his caravan with him. The covenants meant that he was obliged to store it elsewhere, and he eventually sold it. A few years later we bought a camper van and had no problems keeping it parked on our drive.

The Institution of Civil Engineers apparently have an annual "Erection of the year" award.

When we bought our house some 40 tears ago, we were informed by our solicitor that covenants on the property prohibited the keeping of caravans on the site. This covenant did not apply to motorhomes or campervans, but only to actual caravans. Apparently a hangover from the times when a landowner would have sold off part of his land and would still have been living nearby, and did not want the nuisance of it being used by travelling fairs or gypsies. Apparently such covenants were not unusual. (We are also prohibited from quarrying clay and burning bricks with it: our local soil is a good brick-earth, and the smoke from a traditional brick burning clamp would have been a nuisance for weeks). My understanding is that contracts should be normslly construed in the context of the meaning that its wording had at the time that the contract was agreed, but then again, the law is inba constant state of flux, and only the courts can give definite answers as to what the law is. Wealthy organisations and individuals often rely on the fact that less wealthy people cannot afford to go to court to assert their rights or challenge decisions. Many years ago a judge neatly summed it up by observing that justice, like the Ritz Hotel, was open to all.

Myself and my wife did do it clockwise in a week some 40 years ago, but it didn't allow time for detours. It was at Easter, and the only real issue we had was on that long straight stretch of the Shopshire Union on the Western side of the ring where the canal runs on an embankment which, at the time, had no vegetation to provide shelter, and a strong wind was blowing in from Wales at right angles to the canal. To stop ourselves being blown against the towpath, we had to give the engine full throttle and hold the tiller over, thereby proceeding with the boat at an angle to the direction of travel, with the bows a couple of feet from the far side and the stern a couple of feet from the towpath, quickly straightening the tiller when we passed the occasional clump of trees.

In the absense of a written agreement to the contrary, unless the designer is an actual employee, the intellectual.property rights in something that you pay someone to do for you, normally belong to the designer. There have been a number of cases over the years where the courts have had to decide whether or not the designer was working in the capacity of an employee or as a freelance consultant to determine who owned what. Which is why there is a need to have ownership of rights explicitly stated in a contract. I used to work in the GEC Patent Department. GEC businesses were supposed to consult us before entering into contracts to ensure that the IP rights were appropriate. The consequences of not doing this were highlighted when one of the GEC companies, in their haste, hadn''t bothered, and then discovered to their not inconsiderable cost, that the money they had paid for someone to design something for them, only covered the right to use the single prototype apparatus he had built for them. They then had to buy the rights from him before they could go into production.

That was the Schilling, sub-divided into 100 Groschen. On a skiing holiday in a remote Austrian village in the early 1970's, the village shop kept a small tub of boiled sweets next to the cash register. Due to a shortage of small denomination Groschen coins, you would sometimes be given the balance of your change in sweets.

A two up and two down plus yard would probably provide more living space than some of the recent offices-converted-to-flats social housing developments, some of which according to a Radio 4 programme last year, have no windows, relying on a skylight to provide natural lighting and ventilation, and having no private outdoor space.

One morning a couple of decades ago at the freshly-painted wooden balance beam of a lock on the Southern Oxford, I was able to give my children an impromptu physics lesson in heat transfer. The black part was bone dry and warm to the touch. The white-painted end was icy-cold and still covered with drops of water from the previous night's rain.

The apparent paradox of black robes being preferred by desert nomads was discussed in the letters section of the "New Scientist" several decades ago (circa 1980 I think). From memory, given their loose fitting robes, one view was that the heat promoted convection currents in the outer layers of their garments, thereby removing sweat more effectively, but it was a long time ago that I read it, and the discussion stretched over several.issues.

It was recently reported that manufacture of "Caramac" has just come to an end. I always found them a bit sickly, but each to their own. I remember that they did try relaunching Spangles (Hopalong Cassidy's favourite sweet) a few years ago, but it wasn't a success. Their square shape lingered on in "Tunes" throat sweets for a while.

When a group of us used to hire a boat in the summer, the roof was often used for sunbathing.

A couple of decades ago there was a piece in one of the canal mags by a single-hander about winter canal boating where he described his experience of falling in. The main problem he had in hauling himself out of the water was the weight of his several layers of now sodden winter clothing. Although he was in a marina, there was no-one else around.

As far as I know, you can't legally buy genuine naptha mothballs in the UK any more, the consequence of an EC directive. The substitutes are nowhere as near as effective.