Alan Hammond

According to the weather forecast there are supposed to be light showers here in the North East. According to what is happening outside my house it has been raining heavily non stop since about 1am and shows no sign of easing at all.

I have to admit that I am a bit surprised at how relaxed the rules are covering these things. How long will it be before some one cottons onto the fact that it is not only old people who are allowed to use them? This will shortly be followed by a bit of judicious tweaking to make them go faster as a result of which between them and cyclists it will be safer to walk on a motorway than the pavement.

I think that the danger here is when that kids schoolmates get to hear about it. I would suggest that he is in for a bit of a rough ride and bearing in mind the sort of artillery that he has apparent easy access to that may not be a very good thing.

Bit like when I was in the Police. One of the regular sort of domestic dispute calls would be from some woman who would want her drunken lodger chucked out. Nine times out of ten it would turn out that the lodger had been living with her for at least ten years and that apart from the legal niceties they were to all intents and purposes married. Quite often the woman would even be using her mans name. Until that is she got fed up with him when all of a sudden he became a lodger once more and she wanted him kicked out of her house normally in the early hours of the morning. The usual answer would be to lock the lodger up for being drunk and disorderly and next day call the woman to come and collect him which they invariably would.

Does anybody know how to adjust the hinges on a upvc door? I am about to lay some laminate flooring in my utility room and unusually for me I did a bit of checking first and found that the door will rub slightly on it on the catch side as it swings. There are three hinges on the door which are made up of an oblong of upvc attached to the door with an allen screw in and a tube split in two halves with a pin in attached to the frame. The tube has got allen keys top and bottom. So far my fiddling with the hinges does not seem to have any effect other than to make the door a bit springier to open and close the rubbing on my test piece of flooring has not been affected in any way. Any help and advice will be welcome.

At one time in the not too distant past membership of the masons was a prerequisite for promotion or appointment to any of the best jobs in the Police Force. Probably applied to a few other jobs as well from what I heard.

I caught a goldfish in one of my club waters a few years back. When I mentioned it on the then club site I was told that it had probably come in with a stocking of crucians as carp breeders often add goldfish to their breeding stock to help boost the strength of the strain and avoid too much in breeding.

For what it is worth I had a combi boiler fitted about four tears ago when the old Baxi back boiler exceeded its sell by date by about fifty years. Fair enough I have had some problems with it, including recently when it took a week to fix a leak, but I would put a lot of that down to poor workmanship on behalf of British gas who have the service contract for it. Also I live in a very soft water area. As proof the element on a five year old electric kettle is as shiny and new today as it was when I bought it. Despite the problems though I would say that it has been worth the money. Apart from the fact that I have no longer got a loft full of smelly tanks valves and pipes waiting to leak or block up at the first opportunity it has reduced my running costs by at least a half or more overall and in the summer months by two thirds. You never run out of hot water which is particularly helpful in our house when of a morning four people are often in line for the bathroom and shower within an hour or so. The radiators are turned down because of the heat they give off and their rapid warm up time. Overall the system is far superior in my opinion to the old back boiler. I may be barking up the wrong tree but I do not think that an RO unit as in reverse osmosis would be a good idea at all. From what I understand from my tropical fish keeping they strip everything out of the water leaving just a simple mix of oxygen and hydrogen. If one is installed on the incoming mains then it would be very expensive to run as they only produce about twenty per cent pure water for eighty per cent waste. The other problem is that when I looked into the possibility of putting in a whole house water filtering system a few months back, mainly to get rid of chloramine etc. when I change the water in my fish tank and top up the garden pond, the advice from the filter firms themselves was that it was not a good idea as it would leave a large amount of unprotected water lying in pipes etc. providing a happy breeding ground for all the nasties that would be otherwise removed. Do not forget either that hard water for all its problem causing with plumbing is supposed to be better from a health point of view than soft.

I fish about half a dozen or so club waters in the Newcastle area. Most of the time I prefer the four that are in private grounds and not open to the public. I know that there have been one or two incidents, normally involving antis or dog walkers, that could have turned nasty on the club waters that the public have access to. As I fish for pleasure and relaxation I choose to avoid those waters as I do commercials.

I have always carried a lock knife with a three inch blade in my tackle box. It was acquired many years ago at a Newcastle match when a supporter kindly threw it at me. Luckily being a Westham supporter he was to thick to realise that it was balanced wrongly for throwing and it was the blunt end that hit me. As for personal defence my money would be on a bank stick or landing net handle over a knife any day of the week. Much longer, more readily to hand, just as effective at short range, especially a nice pointed bank stick, and totally legal. Even a landing net itself wrapped around an assailants head might buy you enough time to do him some real injury or push him in the water.

I have tried Ammo Lock and other similar products in fresh water tropical tanks in the past and I have to admit that I have never been very impressed with them. The only way to get a tank working properly is as Jaffa says with a decent bio filter. But as a first step I would test the water to find out what is wrong with it. The packets of strips that do several different tests at once are only about six pounds and if not all that accurate are at least a good and quick indicator of any problems.

It would seem that Holly has been found. The bloke who took her was in the process of painting her yet again when he was caught. That is definitely going to be an interesting story when the full details come out.

The main difference being that the mystery of the Mary Celeste has been explained. Basically it involved the crew taking to the lifeboat when the cargo started to give off toxic fumes. The idea being that the lifeboat was tied to the ship and that they would return to her as soon as the fumes cleared. As was fairly normal practice then. Unfortunately the rope twixt ship and lifeboat parted and the crew were lost. Apparently deserted sailing ships suddenly appearing were not that uncommon at the time and the only reason that the Mary Celeste became so infamous was because a famous author whose name escapes me in my current state of exhaustion got a hold of the story and put a bit of literary spin on it to the extent of renaming her the Marie Celeste. But the Australian one sounds a lot more puzzling given all the modern day communication and life saving equipement on board.

As part of the general renovation of the pond it was deemed that A) it would be a good idea to enlarge it slightly and deepen it and B to put in a proper rockery. The first thing that I should have remembered was that when I put the pond in I put paving slabs around it and to save money and time hiring a masonry saw and cutting the awkward corner slabs I filled those areas with concrete. This did not want to come up. But perseverance and bad language prevailed and out it eventually came. The second thing that I should have remembered was that a foot below the surface the soil turns into solid clay. Dealing with that also required perseverance and bad language as well as a fairly liberal interpretation of the markings on the tape measure. I did consider doing what somebody near here allegedly once did and report the finding of several Roman relics that he had found when starting to dig his pond, this area being only a mile or so north of that great Geordie wall builder Hadrian`s finest effort. The result of course being that the local historical society dug his pond and most of his garden for him before they twigged that they had been well conned. This was rejected on the grounds though that firstly it was unethical and secondly it was doubtful if the society would fall for the same thing twice any way. My second mistake was the rockery. A quick scan of the net revealed that the lumps of stone that B and Q and garden centres are charging £5 upwards a shot for can be obtained for £100 a ton delivered direct from the quarry and that is retail. As there are about sixty lumps of rock per ton all of which make B and Qs offerings look like mere pebbles it seemed like a good idea. It was when the rock was delivered that I spotted my mistake. Every single one had to be manhandled from the pallet, onto a wheel barrow, carted through the garage and utility room and deposited on the patio, which is about a two foot drop from the back of the house, ready for being placed another thirty feet away at the bottom of the garden at a later time. Some of those rock must have been knocking on for a hundred weight apiece. I kid you not it was the hardest work that I have done for many a decade. In fact I cheated in the end as the Gas board have been laying some new mains and I persuaded one of their labourers to dump two of the biggest most awkward shaped boulders into the back of his waste truck. Which was easy for him as he had great big Hiab to do it with. Those two rocks were about thirty quids worth at B and Q prices which shows how desperate I was. The only good thing about it is I reckon on garden centre prices that the stone I kept would have cost me over four hundred pounds. Now I just need to find somewhere that can sell me a new set of hinges for my back.

Actually they offered me £30 0ff next years insurance without me asking and I was just so glad to see the back of them that I did not bother to argue the matter.