Rail came in after a number of incidents in the 90s e.g. local to me at the time Maidstone crash

One of my friends worked on railway signalling in the 80s. Work was generally done after the last train of the night (daytime work needed someone on lookout and people to jump out of the way quickly), normal thing was to leave one person in the office to answer the phone and for everyone else to go to the pub first. If someone was needed urgentyly, the person manning the phone had the pub phone number. Come closing, off to work.

Making drug and alcohol testing compulsory for everyone made the system safer and took out the pressure to conform to the drinking culture.

Perhaps we should have a similar rule in government?

I’ve got 2 codes if anyone wants them – please DM me

Thanks all, I’ve passed the suggestion of Calibre to my mother in law

Can anyone recommend a good independent Omega watchmaker? My mother in law’s been given a vintage Omega, she sent it to an official Omega watchmaker who want to send it to Omega Switzerland which I’m guessing will be very expensive.

Would you say “Tesco are selling apples…” or “Tesco is selling apples…”?

What if the apple seller is Sainsbury’s? Sainsbury’s’s selling apples?

It’s quartz so the movement is unlikely to be a problem. No idea if the £80 watches will be a fake but for the same sort of money you can get a genuine Pagani Design with a Japanese quartz movement from Aliexpress. Quality of Pagani is good – check out Just One More Watch on YouTube for loads of cheap watch reviews.

Up to £250 you’ve got lots of choice e.g. Citizen Ecodrive. There are still savings to be had buying from Creation Watches in Singapore, I’ve used them before with no problems.

I’m on bluesky already – how are codes allocated?

Not enough public information films – I’m half serious, I still say that to myself

mandatory computer-based training that’s the same irrelevant content every year and which lacks a fast-forward button

They’ve changed ours so that we can read a short summary and go straight to the test, far better.

I’m not sure that a thin can will work as a Dutch oven i.e. in contact with coals. All the Dutch ovens I’ve used have been cast iron. I think thin steel will get hotspots which will burn the stew.

Should be fine hung above though.

People who make a third lane on wide single carriageways i.e. overtake towards oncoming traffic. Especially in the rain and dark first thing in the morning. You might be happy to accept the risk of a head on collision at 60mph to save 5 minutes but the rest of us aren’t and don’t get the choice.

My daughter’s now 15. 18 months ago she blew her ACL playing rugby (and then playing on, and then going swim training). She had some months of physio to get her muscles back into shape then she had her ACL reconstructed. She’s back playing sport and swimming competitive all strokes including breast stroke which puts most strain on the knee.

As she was under 16 she needed a paediatric knee surgeon so had to go to Oxford but other than that, no problems. She’d already stopped growing, girls tend to stop earlier than boys so that may be a factor. Don’t accept “normal life without sport”.

I was feeling left out so blew my ACL this summer falling off my MTB. I’ve been given the “normal life without sport” lecture but I’m going back in November to get booked in for reconstruction. The way I look at it is that without an ACL I’ll always have a weakness in that knee and I’m young enough still at 59 to stand the operation. I really, really don’t want to have to give up riding my MTB and just stick to road…

I wish your son good luck, if he wants to talk to my daughter about what the reconstruction was like I’m sure she’d be happy to do so.

Uniqlo selvedge are good value, I don’t know how ethical or not Uniqlo are.

Very nice as usual Kayak23

And a watch question – my mother in law has been offered a vintage Omega by one of her friends who by all accounts is a bit of a collector. Assuming it’s 1950s/60s how much would a service cost? 

Really good watch story on About Effing Time. It does include people being nice to each other as well as the watches – I hope that’s OK?

5 litres of degreaser from Screwfix for about £12 or just use washing up liquid. Big tube of multipurpose grease is £5.50. Be prepared to find that it’s made of cheese.

A friend bought the cheapest Halfords MTB in lockdown (it was all that was left). Bottom bracket was square taper so in theory bombproof but was knackered from new. Crank to bottom bracket interface wasn’t correct – lots of play even with a new BB so new cranks too. I think rear derailleur was next.

It was a fun project for us in lockdown but it’s probably taken £50 of parts to make it useable.

People who carry on pilling stuff on the indoor recycling box until it’s overflowing and then start stacking it on the sink drainer. See also filling the indoor food waste bin and then adding more to a bowl rather than emptying it outside.

Nothing obvious in the photo, interestingly I can’t see any capacitors on the board although the photo’s a bit blurred at the top – can we have another photo and one of the other side too please? The thread linked above suggests a fuse, I can’t see any in the photo either.

What’s the other end of the ribbon cable connected to? More photos please!

Could you post pictures of the circuit board please? Might be easier to draw on a picture than try to explain.

Re “what dehumidifier”, if this one lasted 15 years than another of these ones sounds the right answer.

Cheap crap (sic) answer is to keep number of sewage tanker company handy and a spare pump, if the pump fails call them out then replace the pump.

Expensive but better solution is to get a bigger chamber with twin pumps.

Wrong solution that a friend’s dad used when we were teenagers was to use a slurry pump to spread it on the orchard (they lived on a small holding). It stank.

Second arrest – this time a 60 year old

“what must be true in order to” when you explain why something can’t be done

Crystal glasses would be ruined, the lead/magnesium/zinc content gets etched away by the strong alkali dishwasher water.

Other glass should be OK, but I’ve noticed my Pyrex measuring jug getting a little less clear.

Pint glasses seem fine – I guess they expect them to be put through a washer.

Apples have changed a lot since I was a kid – and for the better.

I grew up in Kent in a village called Loose (in a house called Bramleys). There was a Bramley orchard behind the house and a pear orchard in front (neither ours). Across the main road was a cherry orchard. All big, traditional trees. The trouble was that the business model of using east end factory workers on summer shutdown to do the picking for their summer holidays didn’t work in the 80s.

A few miles away was the East Malling research station. They developed trees that didn’t need ladders to pick the fruit and that developed more consistent fruit. These took over in the 90s. Flavour wasn’t so good but it was competitive with the French and tastes as good as the imported French varieties.

The cherry tree orchard was grubbed out as picking from ladders was no longer economic or safe. The replacement cherries were grown on dwarf stock in tunnels which also meant no need for bird scarers / shotgun parties.

Fruit used to be stored in barns and by Christmas it was going soft. Chilled warehouses came in and then chilled inert atmosphere which meant year round apples of reasonable quality.

Traditional varieties will never compete in the mass market. Modern varieties on dwarf stock now taste good and are cheaper. The price to farmers still needs to go up but grubbing out orchards and replacing them with new stock is the right thing to do for the business. After all, that was exactly what the Victorians did when they planted the first modern orchards.

How much does it cost to fit a surge protection device to a consumer unit?

Agreed, the Spanish system with large communal bins roadside or underground works well

My mum was an officer in WRAC in the 50s stationed at Larkhill. A lieutenant colonel did something unwanted. She reported him. She was transferred but he did get a reprimand.

She was a tough nut.

Electric boilers are like kettles – a heating element surrounded by the water. Unless the element is covered in limescale they’re all about the same. The only thing that makes a big difference is the insulation of the tank. Also worth making sure that none of the hot taps drip.

If you don’t know who your supplier is use

https://www.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/who-is-my-electricity-supplier-and-what-is-my-mpan

then follow this process

https://www.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/i-already-have-electricity-domestic/disconnect/permanently-disconnect-what-s-involved

Looks fairly expensive

Neighbour screaming “tree murderers!” at the tree surgeons taking down the rotten walnut tree in our garden. And a few months later when her cat got run over and lost a leg, she claimed to the police, local paper and RSPCA that my wife had done it with the garden gate.

Thankfully they inherited some money and sold up. The people who bought the house had to more or less gut it, it was filthy. Maybe something to do with all her other cats.

For balance will the BBC be covering the Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, EU and remainer view of this? Probably not.

£1k cash and the employer pays the tax. My employer in the early 00s did this for exceptional work, worked very well and people got what they wanted – my friend Dan bought a Cotic Soul.

I’m a great fan of acre-feet as a measure of volume. Used to measure dams in the USA e.g. the Hoover dam contains 28,945,000 acre-feet. Makes sense when you’re thinking about flooding and irrigation.

Basins in the gents with only a hot tap. That’s OK but putting a sign up saying “Danger, hit water” annoys me. What am I meant to do? Risk the dangerous hot water or not wash my hands?

People who leave their shopping trolleys randomly in supermarket car parks. Yes, someone employed by the supermarket will pick it up from the place you’ve dumped it but if you managed to walk around the supermarket you can walk the extra 10m to put it in the right place.

See fuzz testing – chucking garbage in in a vaguely systematic way to see what happens. Best done if the people crafting the garbage already have a fair idea of what might cause the system problems.

It may be that everyone did all the right things but shit still happens sometimes.

What gets done in Spain that can’t be done in a pool in the UK?

Per the previous reply, nothing except the 50m pool. If you’re swimming at national level or hope to, you need experience racing and training in 50m pools instead of the normal 25m pools. Locally, there’s a 50m pool at Wycombe and one at Hillingdon. Both are fully used by their clubs so the 05:30 slot is the only one available for an hour. Previous camps have been at Mount Kelly (Hogwarts transported to Tavistock) and near Pisa.

There are more 50m pools in hot places because they don’t need to build a ruddy great building over the top and heat it all.

Championships have been in Sheffield Ponds Forge and London Aquatics Centre – both excellent but fully used.

Good new though – flights re-arranged for tomorrow at 14:30, muhc more civilized.

BA472 all OK on the BA flight checker when I went to bed, up at 02:30, now marked as cancelled. Not unexpected. Sadly the swim training camp is only 4 days so if the flight gets moved too many days my daughter will miss it.

My daughter’s flying out to a swim training camp in Spain at 06:10 from LHR. I suspect that I’ll still have to get her there for 04:00 at which point she’ll have to wait all day. No info on the flight, BA site says “Sorry, we are having an issue with our system at the moment, please try again later.”

The last thing the people sorting shit out need is to be explaining to the transport minister for two hours how it all works

Absolutely, I work on a critical banking system and when things go horribly wrong (thankfully not often in the last 10 years) we set up 2 bridges, one for the important people actually fixing the problem and one for the senior people to talk amongst themselves.