djbobbins

The benefit against "high street" prices is very small. What you do get with e.g. a BP fuel card is a standard price, so if you have got vehicles on the motorway you can fill up at normal prices rather than motorway services. Personally I have gone for the Tesco clubcard credit card approach and use it solely for fuel; effectively means 4 weeks free credit on my fuel spend and a few reward points as well (more if I use a Tesco forecourt, obviously).

At work we own and insure a coal ship capable of carrying a 22,000 tonne payload and I'm guessing we pay less than that. Interesting comparison though!

I'll tell you, just so you can all say what I said when I saw it (which started with what the...) It was £100,554. Yup, you heard it here folks, over a hundred grand to insure a £5k car for a year, with 5 years no claims!! I kid you not, I looked and re-looked at it thinking my eyes were deceiving me, and even got one of the guys that works for me to check it as well.

Higher than all of those, much higher!

I got a quote today for re-insuring my wife's Nissan Note shopping trolley, from the price comparison website that uses the Iranian standup comedian for its advertising (don't know if I'm allowed to mention specific website names). It's a standard car, 1.4 petrol, basic model. My accident history is clear but my wife had a no fault accident last year. Cheapest quote was just under £300 fully comp, protected NCB etc. Anyone want to hazard a guess on what the highest quote was, for one year's cover? No prizes but it might be worth a laugh...

Or you could just buy chickens in Tesco and sell them at a farmers market?! Not that I'd advocate that of course, 'cos it would be entirely unethical... but I did wonder how well "posh" locally produced charcoal would sell at a farmers' market. I was thinking of selling by weight on a "choose your own" basis with a choice of e.g. alder, ash, etc, with printed labels saying where the wood came from, what the properties of the charcoal were etc. As an extra product, I thought (if any was available) chipped fruit woods might sell well as a flavour enhancer for the bbq, or for using in a smoker. Anyone got any drawings or instructions for making half decent looking homemade smokers? Just another sideline maybe...

I'd been wondering about making compacted logs out of a mix of sawdust and paper, but hadn't bothered because of too many other things to do. I had even thought about boiling the paper and sawdust in water to help break the cellulose down - I thought it might help the end product bind together better at e.g. 70% sawdust : 30% paper, which would presumably give less of an ashing problem. Whilst I've got a plentiful source of free alder logs I think I'll give it a miss. FWIW my mother used to reckon a Yellow Pages was a good way to get the Rayburn going at home...!

Salt water makes me retch but I've taken to rinsing with Listerine total care mouthwash (the fetchingly-coloured pinky purple one) and highly recommend it - it's got antibacterials and I think there are salicylates (i.e. chemical the same group as aspirin) in there too. It's helped me out with nagging aches and I'd recommend it to anyone. Glad to hear you got the abcess sorted mate; I had one years back (under a troublesome wisdom tooth) and it was murder. Had some antibiotics to get rid of the infection and then had three wisdom teeth out under general anaesthetic.

I built my domestic logstore out of 3" x 3" x 8' tannalised posts and boards, with a paving flag base. I reckon if you missed out the solid base, but set the posts into the ground and laid pallets as a floor, you could put three timber sides onto your posts and enclose your logs that way. Say a dozen posts set in a 6x2 grid, 6' apart, would give you 1,080 cubic feet at 6 feet high stacking. Or about 31 cubic metres. Of course if you wanted to be braver about it (don't know how much it would stretch planning definitions of a roof) you could put some ribs across the top of the posts to stretch some form of waterproof cover over. It'd be temporary covering, of course...

Working tomorrow, I guess until about 2pm, although the boss has promised that anyone who's in by 8:45 will get breakfast bought for them! Back in on the 29th til NYE, then back again on Tuesday 4th...

Cheers guys; I have been doing the topping up with 1:1 mix of water and concentrated anti-freeze (so heavy winter mix) - so hopefully at least it won't freeze up. And for info it's the 3.2 V6 petrol beastie so no turbo to worry about; just the thirst bigger than George Best, Alex Higgins and Oliver Reed on a night out. Before they croaked, obviously.

I thought exactly the same about the woman in the 1 series; clearly she didn't apply the best common sense but as for the guy filming her out of the window rather than going to give her a push, well, I suppose chivalry is dead after all!

A guy that used to work for me has just gone to work in Hanover. He's got a BMW 1 series (as per the woman driving into the house) but as per German law has had it fitted with winter tyres. A couple of weeks ago in freezing temperatures he did a 1500km round trip to Copenhagen over a weekend and said that the difference in tyre performance is amazing; hardly any loss of traction. Clearly that wouldn't help on sheet ice but I suspect goes a long way to explain why current snow and compacted snow conditions in the UK cause chaos relative to other countries where law does not allow people to drive around in cars fitted with hard compound low profile summer tyres in snow and ice.

Thanks for the feedback guys, much appreciated. Along with radweld I can think about raw eggs and something that looks like porridge. Mind you, if anyone suggests other breakfast related fixes - e.g. poking a bacon butty and a couple of hash browns into the rad - I might start to think there's a bit of urine extraction going on... Good call about keeping another bottle of radweld at hand; will pop back to the shop tomorrow if I get time. I'll keep an eye on the coolant levels and if I remember to do so will post my experience on here.

I did wonder at first if it was a head gasket problem but don't think it is. I've had a couple of head gaskets go on previous cars (a 1.2 litre, 4 speed Vauxhall Nova will cruise at three figures on the clock, just not without consequence) and the Isuzu hasn't got the telltale symptoms of misfiring on one cylinder when cold, nor the (particularly) steamy exhaust. There are no visible leaks or drips when it's ticking over and up to temperature, but putting two and two together I did realise that the inside seems to suffer from a lot of condensation. A bit of investigation led me to a damp carpet in the passenger footwell so I am guessing perhaps a heater matrix problem...

Has anyone got any experience of Radweld? I noticed my Trooper was getting hot over the weekend and when I checked the coolant it was low - shamefully low, I have to admit - I put about 4 litres in to bring it back up to level. So - having refilled it and done another couple of hundred miles, it'd emptied the reservoir again this morning, so I have stuck a couple of bottles of Radweld in it, filled up with antifreeze and tried again. After a couple of trips today (about 30 miles) the reservoir level appears to be staying constant. I can't say that I expect the radweld to be a permanent fix, but just wondered whether I should be getting on the phone to the friendly mechanic now or whether it will hold up until the next service is due in about three months time? Could do without a big bill at the moment, what with Christmas and all that! If anyone has got any experience of using radweld I would appreciate a bit of feedback... Cheers

Seeing Ben Collins on Fifth Gear makes it easy to realise why the BBC never let him speak!!

14/20 - all the US related bits made it a bit more tricky!

I did Crib Goch a few years ago, although wasn't expecting to do so - a mate set up a weekend of "walking in Betws-y-Coed". What he didn't warn is that his brother, who was making the walking arrangements, does full on hiking like 2 weeks at a time in the Alps with all his kit. We had just got to the top of the horseshoe when a Sea King started flying over - one of the walkers had got to the top and frozen at the prospect of the drops on either side of the path. Probably the only time I will have the chance to take photos of a Sea King at about 15m distance, from directly underneath. Ace scenery but I was cream crackered at the end of the day. Came back the easy way down Snowdon and had a swim in one of the pools, gave the young lady onlookers something to admire! Good to see the film clip to remind me of the day.

This is going to be a really noddy suggestion, and I don't mean to offend anyone, but has it got air con? If so, you sure it's not just the condensate dripping off the air con unit? (I don't know if they got around to fitting AC on 200TDi's, the friendly Japanese at Isuzu did on my '93 Trooper - although AC at the moment is about as useful as chocolate boots!)

I guess I am feeling twinges of guilt (hence the need for catharsis by writing this) but just wondered what anyone else thought. We needed to do the weekly grocery shop today, so the wife stayed at home with the kids and I got the Trooper out. The good karma bit of my day was that I deliberately went round to speak to the elderly next door neighbours to check whether they needed anything. On the way back from the shop, I stopped at a junction and saw on the other side of the road a guy of about 30 kicking snow away from the front wheels of a Saxo VTR. He was trying to turn off the main road, up a slight slope onto a D road (i.e. country lane) which is only a rat run to another A road, but not having any success. He was in shirt sleeves and presumably had neither coat nor shovel. So my twinge of guilt is that I didn't stop to help, but then I kind of thought that if he hadn't got the brains to help himself by (a) taking a coat, (b) taking a shovel, or © sticking to the main roads - which were driveable in 2wd vehicles, then he probably needed to learn a lesson from it. I guess my mood at the time wasn't helped by some local teenage toerag having having lobbed a snowball at me through the window of my car. So - should I be guilty? Or had I done my good deed in offering to help elderly neighbours and the guy out on the road was just due the snow version of a Darwin Award?

In Warwick, a bit of snow yesterday, about another half inch overnight, but has been snowing continuously since about 8:30 this morning and forecast to do so through until about 9pm tonight. Not particularly big flakes but constant and fairly intense - if it was rain I would describe it as heavy drizzle...

Looks like a real improvement. Are the stumps being left to re-coppice? If it's anything like the 40 or so alder I felled last year it will be 6 foot high again this time next year! Out of interest, I used a couple of pieces of green alder (about 3-4" diameter) as props for an upside down water tank which I was using to stack some other timber under. The bottoms of the props were pressed into rich loamy soil, not too wet or anything. Three months later I went back for a look and was a bit surprised to see my "props" had sprouted leaves all the way up and were growing. Is this common? I've not seen it before and don't know if it's something specific to alder??

Here you go:

I visited one of the wood-fired district heating plants in Malmo in 2008 when they were still dealing with the wood coming in from the aftermath of the (2006?) storms. Have got a few pics on an old phone somewhere; I will try to dig them out and post them on here. I seem to remember the chipper being an impressive piece of kit...