OneGuyFromBarlick

Don't screw your face up, show disgust or sulk when there is an east wind blowing. My mother said that if you did it would stay that way.....

If you have a discoloured aluminium pan try soaking it in a weak soda solution. Soda is a solvent on aluminium and it will soon clear the satins. Clean the pan well afterwards as aluminium is, in the long run, bad for us humans.

If you hear the pitter pat of tiny feet in the space between the ceiling and the upstairs floorboards and suspect you have rats, forget it! It's mice. Rats make very little noise, if you hear them it's more like a slithering noise. Mice all wear ammunition boots and don't half make a scutter. We had a permanent population of mice in Hey Farm most likely migrating from the barn and many a time at night they would stampede from one side of the house to the other. That's why we always had a good cat population about us.

The noisiest mouse I've known was the one that got into a box in a top corner of our bedroom. The box was there when we bought the house and was made to allow CH pipes to get from the loft to another part of the house. We couldn't sleep for the noise and we had to trap it and give it a new life under our garden shed.

Here in Somerset there are still plenty of cob houses and their walls are often honeycombed with burrows made by mice. People say they can hear the mice running through the walls at night.

To clean a stained glass vessel such as a decanter. Drop a length of brass sink plug chin in with some warm soapy water and shake well until the stains have been moved. Rinse out. To dry the inside of a narrow necked vessel, fill with cold water and then hold it upside down while draining whilst at the same time running cold water over the outside. Miraculously almost all the water will drain out leaving only some tiny drops.

For the decanter, if you haven't the chain that Stanley mentioned, put a good amount of raw rice in and shake about vigourously a few times then soak and rinse. My daughter did this with a dirty antique decanter and it came up a treat.

Stanley wrote:Drop a length of brass sink plug chain in with some warm soapy water and shake well until the stains have been moved. Rinse out.

That sounds better than the little metal balls that you can buy for the same purpose. If you're not careful with the balls they go missing and end up where you least want them.

They used that method in the laboratory at West Marton Dairy. I tried it at home and it worked a treat!

Did you manage to keep your balls in order?

They were your balls, not mine. I was on brass chain!

I just use a bag for mine...

Cathy, when I wrote my reply to Stanley about using metal balls, your message about raw rice hadn't appeared (must take a long time getting here from Oz) and I've only just read it. Rice sounds a lot more user-friendly than having little metal balls rolling about in the sink, dropping down the plughole or onto the floor and getting under the feet!

No worries Tize, there's usually more than one way to do things.

Soot used to be useful stuff. Used for cleaning your teeth and it was a slug repellent if put round valued plants.

Strangely, I read some pages yesterday of a book written in the mid-1800s by the son of an eminent geologist. While on the topic of lime and carbonates he deviated to mention his way of preventing a kettle scaling up - place an `ordinary marble' in the kettle and its motion will prevent scale forming. I guess it's one big ball instead of lots of small balls!

I think the glass marble would knock the lime off as it formed and you'd get it in your tea! One thing about water processing that always intrigued me was that at Kell Well at East Marton where the estate water supply was a large spring of limestone the 'hardness' of the water was reduced by pumping the water through a bank of large iron vessels containing hydrate of lime. I could never understand why adding lime did any good.

Stanley wrote: I could never understand why adding lime did any good.

click here

Well, there you are! Thanks China....

Excellent stuff China (though I admit to skimming pages 2 to 10).

When boiling dried peas, drop a clean knob of coal in the pan. It works! Mushy peas far quicker.

Is there such a thing as a "clean knob of coal"?

Yup, just wash it!

Half a teaspoonful of Bicarbonate of Soda preserves colour when boiling green vegetables.

Before hanging out several pair of knickers/jocks thread them all onto your arm, grab a bunch of pegs and hang them up. It saves a lot backwards and forwards to the washing basket and is much quicker.

Were we talking about drain cleaners?
Just came across this tip - Make your own natural 'draino' powder by mixing 1cup baking soda, 1cup of salt and 1/4cup of cream of tartar. When you need to un-block your drain, pour 1/4cup of this mixture into the drain followed by 2cups boiling water. Let it sit for an hour before turning on the tap water.