THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Tizer]

Yes, they're still at it. Scientists from Edinburgh University are studying the burning bings... LINK

It's similar to the burning shale cliffs on the south coast of England, as at Kimmeridge... LINK

[Stanley]

Interesting links. I note that the man talking about Kimmeridge in 2013 used the term 'inflammable' when of course he meant flammable. I thought we'd sorted that one!
Spontaneous combustion of coal cargoes in ships used to be quite common and oily waste produced in textile mills which contained organic oils like Linseed were very prone to it. Insurance policies stipulated they had to be stored in a fireproof building separate from the mill.



Loading sweeps for disposal at Bancroft in 1976. They were stored in the redundant air raid shelter in the yard.

[Stanley]

Looking at the prevalence of debt in our modern culture I can't help thinking back to how debt was regarded 70 years ago. The old fear of the workhouse was alive and well and people were afraid of debt so they avoided it like the plague. You didn't buy anything unless you had the money available or were quite sure you could afford the repayments on anything bought under what we called 'the drip system'. In those days building societies were mutual associations run on a not for profit basis and were rock solid institutions as their assets always vastly exceeded the book value of their debt. How things have changed!

[Stanley]

It struck me the other day when the bin men came in their massive six wheeler that the old bin men would have been astounded. They had a small five ton tipping wagon with curved shutters that could be slid over to open one side and carried the galvanised tin bins on their shoulders to tip them in the truck. They took the lids off the bins before they picked them up and so always had the risk of any excess in a full bin spilling down their necks. Some councils provided hats with a flap covering the back of the neck for this reason but apart from that no protective clothing and certainly no wash basin on the side of the truck!
There was no recycling at all, everything went into the landfill. It's a measure of how we consume resources today that families make a comparatively enormous amount of waste every week.
Another factor in those days was the prevalence of the open fire. Most rubbish was burned, even the empty tins to stop them smelling in the bin. The majority of the waste was dry ash, that's why they got the name dustbins.....

[Tripps]

And they had a team who got the bin from your garden (if you had one), and another that put it back after it was emptied. You're right though - everything that would burn went on the fire. Some called it 'th'ash can'.

I still miss putting orange peel, and nut shells on the fire - they burned lovely, and throwing salt on - it burned blue.

[Tizer]

I'm the odd one out in our village - I crush every can and plastic bottle to reduce its volume before putting it in the recycle bin. No-one else does that, although the council asks in their literature for residents to do it. It helps me because I can get more in the bin and it helps the collectors to get more on the lorry. I can't understand why others don't do it - it's so easy and only takes seconds!

[Stanley]

David, I think the salt burned orange (sodium), sugar burned blue. My mother used to scatter a teaspoonful on the fire if we had bad coal and it wouldn't burn properly. That was even during the war when it was rationed!
Tiz, same thing applies to leaving the caps off the milk containers, if you don't the muncher can't compress them in the wagon.

[Tripps]

"David, I think the salt burned orange (sodium), sugar burned blue
Correct - again dash it.

Speaking of bins - I had mine rejected today, they emptied my neighbours' but mine was still full when I went to bring it in. I rang the council for a stewards' enquiry, and to my amazement, the lady there was able to go on line, and read a report from the bin men as to why I'd been left unemptied. This was within less than an hour of the event. She was able to tell me that I had 'contaminated' the recyclable rubbish with polystyrene, which was true, but I didn't know it was not a recyclable item. The offending item was well down the bin, not concealed, just covered by other stuff. The must have had a root to find it. She denied they would ever do that - due to 'health and safety' concerns.

Remember what I said about never operating at a level of technology below that available? A sticky label with tick boxes would have been quicker and cheaper.

However it's an ill wind. . . .
I spoke, (laid it on a bit thick actually), about my difficulty, post surgery etc, in pushing the bin the 100m to the road, and she said she would send me the form to apply for extra assistance, and the team would pick it up and return it to my house. That sounds good, but actually the exercise is good. It's good to know though, that help is available if needed.

I complimented the lady on her handling of the problem, and said it was a pleasure to complain to her. 'Aah bless' she said.

[Stanley]

Isn't it nice David when we get through to an efficient human being and not an anonymous call centre or even worse one of those automated systems. My best experience was when I rang Balfour Beatty to ask them to put right some damage they had done to the tarmac outside my gate when they did the big water main refurb in Barlick. I found myself talking to the secretary of the CEO! When I expressed surprise she said that her boss didn't believe in automated complaints systems or dedicated call centres 10,000 miles away. I wonder whether that still applies.....

[Tripps]

If that's the same Balfour Beatty that changed the street lights in our village last year - she'd be doing little else, other than fielding complaints.

A quick google shows they are doing Cambridge next. Good luck with that.

Complaints have flooded in from communities across the county at the length of time it takes Balfour Beatty to replace a single streetlight. Different teams are responsible for digging the holes, removing the old lights and replacing the new ones – meaning holes can be left for months. However, Balfour Beatty is pledging that under its new approach it will get each streetlight replaced in no less than five days in some of Cambridge's most congested and picturesque areas. The spokeswoman added that this way of working was more expensive, though. These costs therefore have to be balanced with the amount of disruption likely to be caused – hence the system used elsewhere in Cambridgeshire.

[Tizer]

Tripps, I think the council lady would be telling the truth that they wouldn't rummage through your recycle bin because it would be unsafe to do so (Elfin Safety)...unless of course (1) they've been finding a lot of unrecyclable stuff turning up in the bins on that route, in which case they may be doing a special check on the bins, or (2) the bin is like ours, so small thatit's easy to see what's in it. Another possibility is that someone has dropped a used take-away tray in your bin as they passed by - the plastic ones are made of extruded polystyrene. Our council got agitated recently because a lot of food was turning up in the black non-food waste wheelie bins instead of being put in the little brown food bins. We were all left letters telling us it's naughty to do that and attached some free biodegradable bags to line the brown bins.

[Tripps]

"they wouldn't rummage through your recycle bin because it would be unsafe to do so"

I'm fairly sure they did though. Just had a look -a sealed bag had been ripped open and no polystyrene was visible. However life's too short to be worried about any of this. I don't want to change into Victor Meldrew.

I'm happy enough with the outcome. I just wanted to know why I (Peter Perfect), had been rejected.

[Wendyf]

Perhaps they have a polystyrene sniffer dog on the bin lorry.

[Stanley]

One of the problems is that it is so complicated deciding what is allowable in the different bins or not. I also note from the posts that there is no uniform policy on food waste or colour coding of bins. In Pendle they have abandoned food waste separation and grey bins are general waste, brown bins recyclables. Some have green bins for garden waste but they are being charged £25 a year now so many have become redundant.

[Tizer]

In our area, the Sedgemoor district of Somerset, we have a black wheelie bin for general household waste (fortnightly collection), a small brown bin for food waste (weekly) , a green bin for paper and glass bottles (weekly) and a black bin for plastic bottles, metal cans and cardboard. You can choose to have a paid-for green wheelie bin for garden waste (fortnightly, alternating with the black wheelie bin). The two recycle bins are shallow open boxes and they can see what's in them.

[Wendyf]

I think I should apply for a rebate on my council tax. Because we are considered to be an outlying farm we aren't on the regular round and have to take our rubbish up to the road in a black plastic sack where it is collected by one man in a truck. Our recycling collection stopped a few years ago, so we have to take it to a recycling point ourselves. Luckily we only fill half a black bag a week.
What is slightly annoying is that other properties on the same postcode get wheelie bins and a proper recycling collection....but they are the ones that have always been in Lancashire.....those of us with historical Kelbrook connections are treated differently!

[Stanley]

Lancashire taking revenge on the White Rose? Probably a hang-over from the days when, before boundary changes, there were three authorities round here. LCC, West Riding and North Yorks. Another peculiarity was that Gisburn Old Track came under North Yorks for some reason and in heavy snow they came from Skipton to clear it. The same confusion still reigns in the archives. Some with Lancashire, some at Wakefield and some at Leeds or even in some very ancient cases at Northallerton! It makes research much more difficult.

[Stanley]

I noted the other day that parents were being fined by schools for taking children out of school during term time for holidays. Completely different from former times when all the textile towns ad annual Wakes Weeks when everything shut down for a week (later a fortnight). Workers drew their holiday pay, packed their bags and decamped to the seaside. Those who couldn't afford a holiday tended to keep to the house because there was an element of shame in not being able to take a break. Lists were published showing all the Wakes Weeks in the North. Some towns, like Barlick, ignored Bank Holidays and took a further week at the beginning of September in lieu. This is what drew my attention to this old custom, the first week in September was always the Barlick September holidays.
One old custom in the early days of annual holidays was the practice of booking at a boarding house on a 'bed and cruet' basis. In order to keep the cost down families took their own food for the week and catered for themselves. During rationing in WW2 we had to take our ration books with us and hand them over to the landlady on arrival (it was almost always a lady) and she used them to buy in the provisions for our meals.

[Tizer]

And once you'd had breakfast you were expected to go out so the landlady could do the cleaning. Do you remember how the residents for the week would all troop out to the front of the boarding house and have their group photo taken? Come rain or shine, usually everyone was smiling.

[Stanley]

Yes I do! Here's an example, the Bracewell family on holiday in about 1900.



I don't know whether it was the general 'we're all in it together' attitude during the war but I can remember that the week's intake into the boarding house soon welded into a unit, like a large family. We got that close that I remember once in Cleveleys my sister and I felt so free that we went into the bedroom of a man who was staying there and raided his stash of black market sugar lumps. We were caught in the act! In our defence, we were very young and starved of sugar.....

[Tizer]

Here's a group photo taken outside Mrs E. Fallon's Mayfield Boarding House in Blackpool South in the early 1950s. I'm the smarmy looking kid on the back row, my Mum behind me with the frilly blouse and my Dad with the dark coloured shirt.

[plaques]

Why do all smarmy kids look alike? of course during the war smiling was verboten.

[Stanley]

Snap! Here's my identity photograph taken at school in 1940 when I was 4 years old. We hadn't a lot to be happy about then.... I think the need for identity photographs in case we were killed in air raids was the start of the common practice of school photographs. The string round my neck is for my identity disc which we all had to wear.

[Stanley]

Posting that pic reminded me that we all had to carry our gas masks everywhere we went and had regular gas mask drills at school. Of course, in the end we never had to use them. Their real value as useful objects came at the end of the war when some enterprising soul discovered that the activated charcoal filter was just the thing for filtering the colour out of red petrol.... (Red petrol was intended for business use only and it was an offence to use it for leisure)

[Stanley]

We walked to school in those days and we generally got some bits of shrapnel to add to our collection. There were often still fires burning from the night before but for some reason we were very lucky in the NW corner of the town where we lived. Something to do with the course the bombers took I suppose. We were shepherded round a hole in the road one morning by police and wardens. There were men in the hole defusing an unexploded bomb from the night before. Today they would never allow the school to open or let us anywhere near. Things were different in those days.....