ahammond

If these new cameras help to get rid of speed humps then I for one will welcome them. Speed humps may slow down traffic to a certain extent but they also slow down and endanger emergency vehicles who are trying to save lives. Added to which we must all at some time have felt that sickening thump as we went over one that we just did not see. Of course the scrote in the stolen car does not give a damn about them as it is not his property that he is wrecking and just carries on over them at whatever speed he wants to. The cameras may not slow him down either but at least it will put him on film so that the courts can see just how dangerous his speed was if he does get caught.

I have sold quite a few things on Ebay and never had anything like that. Take the advice of almost everybody else and do not even reply to it. You may get a few other more insistent enquiries from this bloke but just ignore them as well and he will eventually get the message and move on.

Seeing as to how Honda are bringing out a new version of the Jazz in a couple of months I decided to change my current one a few months earlier than normal. The idea being to get rid of it before the new model dropped its trade in value and also because I do not like the look of the new Jazz. Now in the past in order to borrow money to finance a new car deal I have had at least four or five dozen banks, loan firms, etc. to choose from all eager to lend me cash at varying interest rates. This time I struggled to find half a dozen. I know that my credit score is excellent, house owner never in arrears the whole lot, but even with my own bank I had to jump through hoops to get the money. It then occurred to me that for the past few months or so the amount of junk mail coming through my letter box has dropped from a regular twenty to thirty letters every week begging me to borrow money to none. I reckon that if I am an average example then the credit crunch must be saving a forest load of trees from being converted into bin fodder every week. To say nothing of the strain that has been taken off the postal service and the fuel saved in manufacturing, printing and distributing all of this junk most of which is used as expensive land fill or recycled at yet more cost in fuel back into junk mail. Incidentally I chose not to go for the new Jazz because Honda have dropped the CVT and replaced it with some weird semi automatic system instead. Also they have replaced the spare wheel with one of those spray can things that seals and reflates a punctured tyre. Which is all very well but the last two punctures that our family cars have had involved A) Damage to the wheel rim when the car hit a lump of rubble in the road and a screw driver blade that went right through the tire to the inside of the wheel and driving on it would have wrecked the whole wheel. A can of foam would have been totally useless in both cases. So I opted for a Toyota Prius instead. A bit more expensive but better on fuel and a whole lot more comfortable plus it has a spare wheel.

I bought one about five or six years ago. It lasted about two weeks. The first light breeze and it was almost turned inside out. They are as flimsy as hell you would be far better served biting the bullet and paying out a few extra pounds for a decent one from one of the discount Internet suppliers.

I am a retired Police officer myself and know that there is a vast difference between suspecting and proving. So in this case I passed the information on to the card company's fraud section who are in a much better position to monitor this sort of activity than the Police are. Oddly a different garage not too far away was in the papers just a few weeks later when a member of their night staff was charged with card cloning as a result of a card company investigating a spate of it around the area.

I was cloned a couple of months back. The first I knew of it was when the local supermarket refused to accept my debit card. A quick telephone call to the bank and it transpired that someone in California and someone else in Ireland had tried to buy goods on line within a couple of hours of each other using my card details. The first one in California was enough to trigger the banks protection system and the card was immediately canceled. A bit of a pain for a couple of days to get a new card but at least I did not get my account raided. I am absolutely certain that the card was cloned by a local garage that I do not normally use but went to in the early hours one morning when I was off fishing. The bloke behind the screen took my card and it was out of my sight for a minute or so while he apparently fiddled with the machine before poking it through with my card in. It was then a simple matter to watch me input my PIN number and lo he had all my card details ready to sell on. Lesson learned never let the card out of your sight.

I use Polaroids most of the time when I am float fishing. They take the glare off the water and make the float much easier to see even in comparatively dull conditions.

I will shortly be changing my aquarium so if anybody is interested I have a Classic Cabinet Company model A aquarium ( freshwater tropical ) and stand that will be going on E Bay within the next two weeks. The tank is 36" x 15 x 20" and will come with lighting and a substrate heater. This a quality tank stand and hood that looks like a piece of furniture and not a B and Q flat pack special. Collect only from the Newcastle area and I am open to offers before Ebaying it.

Try www.therustyfish.co.uk. They do a good range of sunglasses including clip ons and even with postage are pretty cheap.

Another bit of gear designed to catch anglers rather than fish.

Actually here in Newcastle we get a lot of Scottish pound notes. But there is a growing tendency for shops and pubs to refuse them and to be honest if I am offered one in my change now I also will refuse it simply because I may be stuck with it. The two one pound coins by the way are Scottish and Welsh and as such perfectly legal tender. So the bus driver was wrong in refusing them.

One of the local bus drivers refused to accept two one pound coins that my wife tried to pay her bus fare with today because according to him they were not legal tender. Both have the normal heads side with a depiction of the Queen and the date 2005. On the obverse one shows the Menai Straits bridge and the other the Forth bridge. The only oddity that I can see is that the edge on both of them is milled with a running diamond pattern instead of an inscription. My first thought was that they were Channel Island coinage which I know is not legal tender in the rest of the U.K but I do not think that they are if my memory of their coinage serves me right. Anybody got any ideas before I bung them in a parking ticket machine?

There are several radio control model submarine kits on the market that can or can be adapted to fire torpedoes. The Americans of course have taken it one stage further and fitted their torpedoes with a variety of lethal devices including .22 bullets. How they keep track of these or aim them I have no idea. Mind they also have live firing competitions between model warships fitted with guns that fire real bullets. Somehow I just cannot see that being allowed on Tynemouth boating lake of a Sunday morning.

The main problem is that bait boats are limited to the model boat/land model radio frequencies by law, but a lot of them are imported and are being used illegally on other frequencies allocated to model aircraft etc. I have not heard of a conflict so far but the day cannot be far off. Plus of course if more than one boat is being used on a lake legal frequency or not then there is always a good chance of a couple of them using the same channel with some pretty interesting results.

Similar thing happened a few years ago off the mouth of the Tyne. I had actually been walking the dog along a path about a hundred feet above the river just twenty minutes before and could see spray completely obscuring two lighthouses at the end of breakwaters half a mile out into the sea. The light houses top out at about forty feet above the water and are about a quarter of a mile apart. All I could see between them that day was solid spray. A three quarter mile long promenade along the river that is normally five feet above high water was constantly being flooded by waves to a depth of at least six feet. Yet an experienced skipper took out a yacht with several inexperienced crew on board on a character building exercise. I think that three of them died that day as well. But that still did not stop five anglers from fishing from the same pier on Thursday night in the middle of the storm. Two were taken off by lifeboat but the other three refused to leave preferring to fish on until next morning when they could walk back along the breakwater at low tide. Fishing is not even allowed from where they were and they must have climbed a gate to get there in the first place.

A club I am in put several traps out a couple of years ago as a result of mink predation on our fish stocks. The paperwork and general hassle just to get permission to use them in the first place was incredible and then they had to be checked twice a day and any mink caught destroyed in a particular way so as not to cause them stress. At least two of the traps just disappeared which was odd as only about four of us knew where they were. After about three months I think that the total bag was three moorhens.

Our local council are offering to do cavity wall insulation for £99. In the past I have always avoided having it done as I live in a 1930s semi and my understanding was that the house was designed to breathe using the cavity wall and that filling it with insulation caused all sorts of damp problems. But that was when I last looked into it about twenty years ago. Does anybody have any information on the current situation re cavity wall insulation and older properties?

I once washed my hands just before messing about with something in my aquarium. There was enough soap residue left on them to kill off several Amazon dwarf cichlids and a few neons. So it is very easily done. I now rinse my hands thoroughly in tap water before I do anything in the tank.

That Edinburgh firm can be found at www.easydevices.co.uk. Recommended from personal experience.

I bought a Tom Tom XL earlier this year to replace a Mido. More than happy with it. Nothing too complicated or with a load of button pushing needed to use it like some others and it seems to be pretty accurate. If you go off the route it gives it just computes a new one from where you are instead of costantly trying to divert you back to the route it originally had you on which the Mido insisted on doing. I find that inputting routes and downloads from the PC is easy as well. But the best feature to my mind has to be the speed limit and camera warnings. That could be a licence saver. The only downside I would say is beware of ordering anything direct from Tom Tom, like a gooseneck holder, they take months to refund your money when they mess the order up and do not even apologise. There is a mail order firm based in Edinburgh who's name escapes me at the moment who are about the cheapest and are excellent for accessories.

I may be wrong but I think that it refers to a method of keeping an aquarium with just plants in it and no or very few fish. The idea being to have a sort of aquatic garden. I believe that they are aslo sometimes called Dutch aquariums.

Technically speaking goldfish are tropical fish as they originate form a warm area of China. Hence the reason that initially they were always kept indoors in bowls or unheated aquariums. But over the years they were introduced to garden ponds and have gradually adapted to our colder climate. Rudd on the other hand are a straightforward native cold water fish. I do not think that it is a matter of compatibility of the two species but one of the Rudd which are perfectly happy in an outdoor pond adapting to the limited space and the increased heat and other enforced environmental changes in an indoor aquarium. Personally I would not do it. I think that the Rudd would be far better off moved to another garden pond.

I have five 2.5" to 3" Angel fish in my Discus tank that quite frankly have now started to become a damn nuisance. Two of them have paired up and every couple of months take over half the tank while they spawn. They just drive everything else into one corner and attack anything that dares to move. The other Angels resent this and for a couple of weeks until the fry get eaten or sucked up by the filter there is civil war in the tank. If anybody is interested in them I will quite happily give them away if they are prepared to collect them from the Newcastle area.

Not so much flak but personally I cannot really see the point in keeping Barbel in a garden pond. They are dark coloured, and tend to feed on the bottom. Which sort of defeats the main point of keeping fish in a pond which is to be able to see them. I would have thought that unless you have a good sized pond that they will be a pretty difficult species to keep bearing in mind their potential size. But as I say not flak just observation and if you have the facilities to keep them why not?

This has just reminded me. Does anybody know what eventually happened to those two heifers who escaped from a slaughterhouse a couple of weeks ago and managed to disappear in an urban area?