That sounds eminently Plod to me. Numpties.
Mind you, my maternal grandfather was a Met. policeman and by no means a numpty, so it doesn’t follow. A cousin, on the other hand…
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It wasn’t the numptieness that upset her; it was the blank refusal to admit that the incident had happened at all. And that includes the hot pursuit, with the helicopter hovering overhead, the entire neighbourhood woken and leaning out of windows to see what was going on, and the solitary crash from the back of her house, where she could see policemen gathered in the mews-bit where there was access to her garage when she rushed to that side of the house to see what the hell was going on.
That won’t have been the actual policemen, it will have been whatever bureaucratic wunch of bankers in charge of the police (not) paying compensation to the public when things have got (sniff) Broke.
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The battery is 6 years old & was becoming unreliable, unfortunately.
I don’t use the car every day, but need it to start, when I do IYSWIM
I will take advantage of the Yardarm, as there is Sortage & Flingage taking place at Carinthia Towers today
Liberates Pitcher
Carinthia.xx
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Everyone but me seems to be sorting and flinging at the moment. It isn’t that I don’t need to, it is that I am all sorted and flinged out for a bit, which is Wet and Weedy. No doubt as the weather improves I will feel more like it until it becomes too hot for that sort of thing.
I’m full of admiration for the industrious flingers of this world.
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Not Wet & weedy at all, although both are appropriate forra Fish
This year, I decided that I wasn’t going to ‘give up’ anything for Lent, rather, push myself & do things which I really don’t want to do. Have had modest success so far, & 1 or 2 (in my eyes) real achievements
Howsummevva
I have had a really good idea, but to make it work I need to find 2 photographs
There are 3 carrier bagsful of Fambly Photies at the back of a cupboard which I have ignored/avoided for years
I hope that the Bluddy Photies are in the first one…
It’s Grand National Day too, which is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but was a bitovva Fambly Day at Carinthia Towers.
Carinthia.xx
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I was given a word of advice by my Mother (who knew everything) about Family Photos. This came on an occasion on which we had just inherited a second lot from a deceased sister and she was trying to put them into some sort of order.
She said: “If I can’t immediately recognise anyone in one of them, I am never going to and nor will anyone else. If there is no date on the back, I will never know when they were either. Trying to work these things out will merely take a long time and will never succeed, and old photographs burn beautifully on a bonfire.”
She added thoughtfully that nobody would ever know, or miss them, either.
I can safely say that I have never missed having any picture which my mother did not know enough about to be able to label on its back, and that the unnamed-and-undated pictures I do have in an album which had a few unnamed-and-undated portraits are simply pictures of an Edwardian man with sidewhiskers and a cap or a Victorian woman posing with a baby in a lace cap, and mean nothing to me whatever beyond those facts. One of them may be Great-Uncle Ernest or Great-Aunt Louise, but I shall never know it.
(And writing on the backs of photos does not work: it smears and becomes impossible to read. Only sticky labels have any hope of legibility in fifty years’ time, and they come unstuck eventually. The only safe thing is an album, with what and when and who it is written under each picture in it. And then nobody ever looks at them.)
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Part of the Grand Plan is to box them up for my Stepchildren, but the two I need are for me to get enlarged/framed/sorted , so I will have to scrabble over a few piles of memories to get there
I am Pondering, & a most suitable displacement activity has presented itself:
After the car was returned yesterday, I drove to the carpet shop, where they sell, amongst the carpets, rugs & everything else, very heavy-duty industrial type ‘carpeting’ suitable as a hall-runner. The front door is the only one I use, & the previous runnner, whilst great to look at, was too soft & tempting for the vacuum cleaner to eat…
The stuff I have bought is water & rot-proof & will stay where it is put, & not curl & thus be eaten by the hoover
Hey Ho
The excitement…
Carinthia.xx
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You really do know how to live. Have a swift slammer to see you reinvigorated?
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That would be great, thank-you
Carinthia.xx
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I just found 4 seriously out of date jars of Mango Chutney
Sigh
Sorry
Wrong Thread… 
Carinthia.xx
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If that was meant for the Cellar, Carinthia, I can move it there… (You could, but I have just had it explained to me how that is done and I would love to try it out.)
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And I can do it, too!
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One, I can understand. Four takes dedication.
Keep it for sticking down corners of wallpaper that come loose - it’s the most viscous substance yet discovered.
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The chances are that unless it has whiskers, chutney is ok for a surprisingly long time. Pickles tend to improve with age, at least for the first five years.
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Surely if you just left it with the lid off for a day or so, the chutney would walk here by itself?
You’re right about pickles. Military Pickle is superb after 3-4 years.
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Though if it has gone bubbly it is probably Not Recommended.
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I once heard a programme about the invention of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce – well, it was also about how it was often a mistake to alter distinctive packaging, but some of it was about Lea&P’s. It seems that the original maker ran a chemist’s shop or something of the sort – somewhere that would make things up for people, anyhow. An elderly retired army gent from India came in one day and asked them to make up a recipe for him, and they duly did: there was rather a lot of it, and when they tasted it during the making it was vile, but on a The Customer Is Always Right basis they did as he had asked, and then put it away to be called for. He never called; he had in fact died. A couple of years later they discovered this, or found it on the back of a shelf, or something, and just before throwing it out one of them tasted it and it was yummy.
So they went into business with it.
And that is why they don’t really like having to put a best-before date on it, because what it needs is a best-after. I will witness that: after my mother’s death in 2000 the bottle she had waiting as the spare stayed in the larder unnoticed, and my father used up the old one and bought more. So when we cleared out the larder after he had died, while clearing the house, I found it, and having heard this programme I thought “Ah-ha!” and tried it, and it was indeed much better than the more recent bottle I had at home. So we now keep a bottle in waiting, and hope that it will be at least five years old before we open it.
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I buy it in 3.5 litre tubs, from Chinese Supermarkets. It costs about £12 for what must be 20 or 30 times the amount a bottle costing £2 or so. It keeps well btw. Biggest challenge … getting the cap off the L&P bottle. The door jamb is my friend in this.
I love the stuff in cooking, despite my anchovy allergy.
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You manage to go 5 years between bottles of L&P.
Respect! I’m lucky if a bottle lasts 5 weeks. 
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You mean if I get one now, I can expect that it will be around long enough to become truly terrific? Wa-hey!
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