Ronaldo47
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Posts posted by Ronaldo47
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Interesting:my experience with french wills was a decade ago.
My experience was that, in general, French legal documents, for example, powers of attorney and assignments of property rights, do not require witnessing. You, and the other parties, if any, only have to sign, state the date and place of signing, and, for multi-page documents, write your initials at the foot of all the other pages.
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The Black Prince boats we hired in the 1970's were 60' Harborough Marine types with gas fired central heating.
The 40' Club Line boat we hired in the early 1980's had hot water heated by the engine and a catalytic gas heater in the rear cabin.
The boats we hired subsequently had diesel-powered central heating.
I'm afraid we didn't keep the brochures.
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If you are contemplating marriage when resident in France, a feature of French law that might seem strange to brits is that about the only class of person who can make a legally-enforceable will is a single person with no children, which is why few french people bother with wills . Once you have children, French law determines how your estate is divided, and children take priority over a wife, who only has the right of residence in a house owned by her husband (usufruct) for her lifetime. To be able to specify the distribution of assets in France accumulated before marriage, it is necessary to draw up a pre-nuptual agreement. [In the film "Private Benjamin" the Goldie Hawn character objected to the idea of a pre-nup, but pre-nups are normal practice in France]
We discovered this when we had to deal with the affairs of my late brother-in-law, a single man long resident in France, who died intestate. At least in France you do not have to pay death duties up front before distributing the estate, payment is made when distribution takes place and is deducted from the sums due to individual beneficiaries.
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I would think that once someone is moored up and plugged in, there will be little chance of a casual visitor dropping by for a traction battery top-up. I have never managed to find a free place at the end of the Oxford, where only boats under 50' can wind anyway.
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It seems that the hookups are provided so that moored boats do not need to run their engines when moored up, rather than for charging traction batteries.
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I did see a stretch of towpath hedgerow being cut and laid in the traditional way on the Nothern Oxford a dozen or so years ago, but that has been the only time.
The talk of "murdering" hedgerows reminds me of an item I heard in a Gardeners' Question Time programme a few years ago about pruning climbing roses. One of the panel members said they had made a comparison of pruning carefully with secateurs and simply using a hedge trimmer, and found that regrowth was far more vigourous with the hedge trimmer.
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On 02/01/2025 at 17:54, Momac said:
The RCR should in theory be no problem at all for second hand boats except in the case when a secondhand boat is imported to the UK.
No boat that was and first used from 1998 in the UK (or the EU) should be without a HIN and CE plate which is evidence of RCR compliance (Or RCD as it was first known).
There are, or at least, were, exceptions as far as Europe is concerned. Things might be different now.
In 2005 my late brother-in-law, a brit who was resident in France, managed to successfully negotiate the regulatory marine minefield and import an "Old Gaffer" into France from the USA. In France, boats have to be registered with the maritime authorities, and registration requires firstly a certificate of construction from the builder giving the boat's dimensions, or if this is not available, a certificate from an approved marine surveyor.
Secondly, it requires a certificate of compliance with official safety standards. The second requirement does not apply to surfboards, canoes, kayaks, experimental boats not for sale, and boats constructed on the basis of, or essentially copied from, plans that were originally designed/drawn up before 1950.
His boat did not, and could not be made to, meet the requirements for insubmersibility or water ingress, so he had to prove it was made to pre-1950 plans. He found out that the plans for the "Old Gaffer" design to which his boat had been built, had been published in a pre-war American yachting journal, and thanks to the internet, was able to locate and buy an original copy of the journal. With this, he was able to obtain official documentation, I think from Bureau Veritas, confirming that the second requirement to provide a safety certificate did not apply, but only on the condition that the boat was not sold on within 5 years of registration.
When he died, my wife and myself, being the only french speakers in the family, had to use a Notaire to sort out his affairs, including disposing of his boat. The notaire (who couldn't have been more helpful) found us a buyer for the boat, but only at the last minute did we find the document with the 5 year provision. The 5 year period hadn't quite expired, so sale had to be delayed for about a month until it had. We had also had to provide official documents showing that VAT had been paid when it had been imported into France. Fortunately my brother-in- law was very organised and we found all the necessary paperwork in neatly labelled file boxes.
To the best of my recollection, his boat had no HIN or CE plate because it was exempt and therefore didn't need them.
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7 hours ago, magnetman said:
Also.slightly odd it is written in a merkin English. Commercialize rather than Commercialise and favor rather than favour.
Many of what we consider today to be Americanisims, are spellings that used to be used here. Color for Colour is often found in Victorian publications, likewise Tire for Tyre, ax for axe, and the -ize ending for -ise. In his writings, George Stevenson referred to his engine drivers as engineers, and his locomotive engines ran on railroads.
Incidentally, a "merkin" is a "pubic hair wig"!
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5 hours ago, Mike Todd said:
The Government cannot afford the costs of filling in the canals and then looking after the consequence in perpetuity
The Langollen would presumably stay open in some form as it is also used to transport water from Wales to the Midlands. I understand that there are proposals to use other canals, such as parts of the GU, in this way too.
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Thanks!
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Just been watching it again on iPlayer, and found that it ends soon after the credits start rolling, so I couldn't check my recollection of authorship attribution!
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A process by which an Act of Parliament can be amended by secondary legislation was first introduced in 2001, and later amended in 2006, as explained in Wikipedia.
The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006 (c 51) (LRRA) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It was enacted to replace the Regulatory Reform Act 2001 (RRA). The Act was and remains very controversial, because of a perception that it is an Enabling Act substantially removing the ancient British constitutional restriction on the Executive introducing and altering laws without assent or scrutiny by Parliament, and it has been called the "Abolition of Parliament Act".
The original 2001 Act was intended to simplify certain procedures involved in complying with statutory requirements, as opposed to making fundamental changes by new primary legislation, and was for example used to good effect to amend the Patents Act in a non-contentious way to simplify procedures in getting a patent, thereby avoiding the need for the standard three readings and committee stage that an amending Act would have required.
However, as is sometimes said, the pathway to Hell is paved with good intentions.
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The bit where the two boats were being overtaken by a pensioner walking the dog, reminded me of our last trip up the Ashby canal!
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And there was what must have been one, right at the very end of the credits, with a line something like "Wallace and Grommit are the authors for the purposes of copyright".
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3 hours ago, MtB said:
The real first rule of management is if your company is on the skids and past the point of no return, spend tonnes of money renovating the directors' bogs and resurfacing the car park. This makes it look like all is well.
Bottom line is if a company you invested in re-paints the white lines in the car park at head office, SELL SELL SELL!!!
Around the millennium, Scott Adams' 'Dilbert' web site used to have pages where readers could contribute things. One such thing was a poll for suggestions on 'How to tell when your company is on the skids'.
At around No. 5 was "They open a brand new office with fountains outside". I was working for Marconi at the time, we were in the "Mayo and Simpson" post-Weinstock era when the directors were spending money like water, and part of my department was to be moved to Cambridge, into a brand new office with fountains outside (and a gym inside).
I should have taken notice of the warning then, and promptly sold the shares I had acquired via the company sharesave scheme, as a year or so later, the share price began its inexorable slide to oblivion!
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The presence of any stream of bubbles is sufficient to indicate the presence of a gas leak.
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I use water in a cup with a few drops of Fairy liquid, apply with a small paint brush, and rinse well with plain water afterwards.
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At the time I left school (mid-1960's), you had to stay until the end of term after sitting your 'A' levels. The maths set spent a week at the local technical college having an introduction to computing (boolean algebra, and simple assembler coding with programs punched on 5 hole paper tape).
One physics master gave us an introduction to the advanced maths we would encounter at uni, while the other let us loose, unsupervised, in the physics lab with the object of letting us do some of the practicals there had not been time to do in class. We preferred to do some experiments of our own, like making an arc lamp using carbon rods from old batteries and the low voltage dc bench supply, and attempting to make a gas-powered flame thrower using a meteorolgical balloon (6' circumference fully inflated) that I got from an uncle who made them. The gas pressure wasn't strong enough to inflate it much, so we first tried to get more pressure by filling a bell jar with gas, and then filling the bell jar with mains water to displace the gas. That worked, but was slow, so we used the lab's vacuum pump in reverse to pump gas from the gas main into the balloon. That worked fine. Connecting the fully inflated balloon to some 1" diameter glass tube with a tap, sticking the end out of the window to the quadrangle and igniting the gas, produced an impressive flame that went straight up rather than horizontally. Nobody came to investigate! A different era.
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Don't forget to add corrosion inhibitor when refilling the system. Copper pipe + steel radiators = sludge.
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We sometimes used to light the bench gas taps too, but I don't think it would work with natural gas unless the tap were only opened part-way.
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You can only get a gas explosion when the ratio of gas to air lies within a range of proportions. The range for coal gas is significantly wider than the much narrower range for natural gas, but leave a leak for long enough in an enclosed space, and the ratio will eventually reach the flash point.
It is more difficult to maintain a large flame with natural gas than it is with coal gas, which is why, if you look closely at a gas burner, you will see that the burner has openings under the main jet for producing a small flame that plays on the base of the gas from the main jet to keep its flame alight.
With the coal gas bunsen burners we used to use at school, if you removed the tube, you could light the gas coming out of the jet and it would burn with a steady luminous flame.
Try this with a natural gas bunsen burner, and while you can light it with a low flow of gas, as soon as you turn it on full, the flame lifts off the jet and goes out. Modern bunsen burners have a tube slightly larger than the main tube at the top, communicating with the main tube via a few holes, to produce a ring of flame at the base of the main flame to keep it lit.
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Vaseline has been used for more than a century to make reliable low-resistance connections in busbars, by filing bright, smearing with vaseline, and bolting up without removing the vaseline. Unlike bearing grease, which is designed to stay put and will adversely affect contact resistance, vaseline will flow under pressure and allow intimate contact between adjacent surfaces.
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My understanding is that that is correct in the absence of an agreement to the contrary. A company I have an account with, has as one of its contractual terms, that the property in the goods they supply, does not pass to the purchaser, until the goods have been paid for in full.
In law, the property in (the ownership of) a thing, is different from the thing itself.
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A chemist friend once told me that washing up liquid contains common salt to make it thicker. Dad once brought home some industrial liquid detergent, and that was as runny as water. Salt could promote electrolytic corrosion between dissimilar metals. A pure soap like Pears would be better.
I am not clear how concentration would affect the extent of bubbling. That would surely depend on the volume of gas that is escaping, as when you find a leak in a cycle inner tube by immersing it in a bowl of water.
Retiring to france with narrowboat
in General Boating
Posted
True. Because my late brother in law owned his house, it was compulsory to use the services of a notaire to deal with everything. Ours was excellent, spoke slowly (in French) for our benefit, and couldn't have been more helpful.
I understand that Scots law is closely aligned to the legal systems of mainland europe, which is why legally qualified people from England can sometimes come to grief when dealing with scots courts without the benefit of a local guy