THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Tizer]

As Billy Connolly said, "When the elephants walked through Glasgow to the circus ground they left mini-roundabouts in Sauchiehall Street".

[Stanley]

Did your grandma make you break it up and share it out Julie?

[Bodger]

My grandmother told me the story of my auntie Dorothy as a toddler bringing home hot brown bread, on investigation it turned out a circus had arrived in town with elephants being walked on the streets, brown bread = elephant dung

[Tizer]

She was probably followed by a marching column of dung beetles! This radio episode on dung beetles is worth listening to... Dung beetleDung beetle

[Stanley]

Little did I know that large parts of my life were going to be intimately connected to crap in all it's varied forms!
I'm dealing with a particularly nasty lump of it at the moment.......

[Stanley]

A news item this morning on a rise of a third in sepsis cases reminded me of the danger we always heard about as kids, 'mind it doesn't go septic!' With the rise of antibiotics this danger receded but it looks as though it is returning to remind us that we are still vulnerable!

[Julie in Norfolk]

Sorry I'm late answering Stanley, I don't recall her sharing! Mind you, her garden was a world apart from the others, her pride and joy.

[Stanley]

You are forgiven Julie!
In industrial Stockport horse muck was solid gold! Actually I meant sharing it out between the plants. My mother wouldn't let me just drop the lumps on the bed, I had to scatter them.

[Stanley]

Explaining about the magnetic wrist brace this morning reminded me of one of the less savoury self-medication practices that my mother believed in. If you had a sore throat, apart from being made to gargle with salt water she found the smelliest sweaty sock in the washing and put it round your neck like a scarf when you were put to bed. I suppose the therapeutic element was the ammonia smell of the sock..... Whatever, it seemed to work!
As I get older my feet don't sweat like they did when I was young so this therapy isn't available now...... No regrets!

[Tizer]

Talking of magnets...Mrs Tiz was with a group of people on a geology course this week and the leader explained about Earth's magnetic field flipping over time and how this can be used to help with dating rocks. There was a lady in the group who couldn't understand what he was telling her. It wasn't the use of the property for dating rocks that fazed her - she just couldn't understand magnetism even in its simplest form. More than that, she didn't seem to want to understand it.

[chinatyke]

Do people really understand magnetism and what causes it, or do they just accept the phenomenon?

[Tripps]

Do people really understand magnetism and what causes it

That was my first thought here, but I said nothing, lest some clever devil explained it all, and I really should have known it. Cue pluggy.

That reminded me of 'force' which is 'that which moves, or tends to move a body'.

OK that's what it does, but what is it?

[Tizer]

In the case of that lady, it wasn't that she needed to learn physics, she just shut her mind to magnetism. A child could have understood what the leader was telling them but she didn't want to know. Yet she'd come along to learn geology. Weird!

Most people at least accept magnetism as magic. They wouldn't necessarily call it magic but that's what it is to them. A smartphone is magic to me. I know it picks up signals via electromagnetic waves and has a battery and lots of rare elements in it but the rest is magic as far as I'm concerned! Most of us will learn as much as we need and can understand but that lady seemed to deny magnetism existed.

[Stanley]

When I was a lad I had a big horseshoe magnet which I suspect was originally off a magneto. I did all the usual small experiments with it including iron filings on paper to show up the fields of force. I class it with gravity, I know the force exists but don't understand how or why. As David says, 'Cue Pluggy'!!

[Stanley]

Do you remember the instructions for making simple machines that were included in some children's publications? I remember making a crude electric motor and my delight when coupling it to a battery brought it to life. I particularly remember the smell of it, electricity used in a crude machine has a distinctive smell! I remember saving my money for a big ball of good twine and making a cable car railway from the attic window the length of the back garden, about 80 yards. A Meccano winch and cable car and I was in business! Even my dad was impressed. Bit different from sitting in the gloom of a bedroom with a tablet playing electronic games......

[Bodger]

From the age of 6 i acquired a large assortment of s/h Meccano from friends and family,, just after the war my father took me to an old Ironmongers in Sheffield there he bought an assortment of loose nuts and bolts 3/16 th. Whit ?, these were weighed out on an old balance scale, in use my father insisted that when used the head of the bolt had to be on the outside of the model. The electricity in our house at the time was DC linked from nearby Tinkers pit, the owner Major Brian Tinker had run a supply from his pit to his house about 2 miles past our house, and he had allowed his workers to connect from this line if it passed their home, My father found an old electric gramophone took the motor out and had it adapted to suit the hole pitch of Meccano and the spindle machined to match the bore of the gears etc. I was a very happy 10 yr old playing with an 110 v electric powered models

[Stanley]

Lovely story Bodge. Private DC supplies were quite common at one time and somewhere I have a book of instructions for running electric tramways and in the back there is a list of different municipal undertakings and the voltage a type of the current they supplied. It varies all over the country. I have an idea the date is sometime before 1920.

[PanBiker]

When I was doing my City & Guilds, my college tutor John Howell said that in parts of Burnley in the early 50's it was quite common to have a mixture of AC and DC supplies to individual houses on some terraced rows and properties. Made field servicing a little more "interesting".

[Stanley]

I'm writing a series of articles on leccy at the moment for the BET...... Supplies in Lancashire were taken over from The Lancashire Electrical Power Company under the 1947 Electricity Act and they set about standardising to 240v AC then so your tutor could well have been right, it would take a while.
There is an article in Rare Texts 'Electricity in East Lancashire'.

[Stanley]

I haven't found that book yet!
Milo has been mentioned in another topic. There used to be a lot of milky comforting drinks, Bournvita was another popular one. I think they were largely aimed at promoting a good night's sleep. We were never fans in our house.

[Tizer]

Don't forget Horlicks - which was regarded as a bedtime drink in Britain and as a breakfast drink in India and the Far East.
The Horlicks factory was well-known to those who used the GWR railway through Slough. Now there's a plan to replace the old factory with 750 houses. Horlicks

[Stanley]

I remember the adverts for the Ovaltine Farm I think it was..... Looked like everyone's idea of the ideal farm. I wonder if it existed?

[Bodger]

https://www.pinterest.ie/pin/486670303467611211/

Made in Hyde Cheshire

[Stanley]

Bodge, I recognise a lot of those names! I must be getting old.....



You reminded me of these..... I just happen to have them about my person. I was reared with dip in pens and have fond memories of them. If anyone wants a couple I have them here!

[PanBiker]

School monitor jobs, as well as milk, you could be elected ink as well as nib or blotting paper monitor.

Nib monitor was a Monday morning role where you dished out a new nib for each pupil. You were allowed one nib for your wooden pen stem, you had to go up and ask the teacher directly for a replacement if you damaged it or ended up with it crossed, indicating some form of miss use.

Ink monitor involved mixing the ink (blue) from powder in a largish enamelled pouring jug then topping up everyone's inkwells, there could be repeat action required during the week.

Blotting paper monitor involved folding and slicing up large (Quarto?) sheets into smaller rectangles about 4" x 3". Invariably white, pink or green in colour. You were expected to only require one sheet each week which was consigned to the bin during Friday classroom tidy.