Smiffy2

Frozen chips, sausages, pies & pasties, small portions of roast meat, the things I quoted earlier. The point is that it's smaller, simpler and cheaper to run than a big oven. Some charities give them to families in financial distress as a way of cutting energy bills.

Yup. Good for chips, chicken breasts, sossidges, pies and pasties, roast veggies. Not for gourmet meals, but a good time-and-trouble saver, but a thing that rhymes with mugger to keep clean. And even the big ones are small.

Well the one on Channel 5 has been a complete pile of Donkey Gonads. I use my airfryer quite a bit, but it's easy to get in a rut - I'd like some new ideas, and not necessarily those that require a top-of-the-range multimode singing and dancing AI controlled model, but ideas that are sensible - I'm not going to fill the basked with curry (no, really). The one I have in France can be controlled from my phone. Why? I have to be there to put the ingredients into the damned thing, why would I wander off and start it from another room? Pointless. And breathe...

Morning all. Woken at 7.30 by the Amazon driver playing knock down ginger. Order included 3.5kg of birdseed, in a plastic tub. A broken plastic tub. So the birdseed was in the box; when it poured out over my feet on the doorstep it gave me a clue that not all was well. So now I have 5 litres of loose birdseed and nowhere to keep it. Impressed? Not so much...

Same thing happened with DIY SOS, the stories took over, and it often felt awkward...

Wasn't he the Singing Bus Driver?

A reception room is one in which you receive people who visit you. That simple!

In the brief period of my life in which I worked for an estate agent, yes, downstairs rooms were referred to as 'reception rooms'. Probably not the dining room, unless you were stretching it. And some of the stories I could tell...

Ummm... I have 2 or 3... Front room, breakfast room and dining room. (Which is full of #1 son's possessions at the moment.)

I've just seen an episode of the Australian version of 'Repair Shop' - the programme where members of the public bring broken things with high sentimental value to a bunch of experts who fix them up and leave everyone with a nice, warm fuzzy feeling. The Oz one left my jaw on the floor. A kid brought in a train set - literally a Hornby Dublo 3-rail set which had belonged to his grandfather. Neither he or his mother had ever seen it set up or running but they wanted it fixed. The boy said he wanted to see his 'favourite train' running again. He said it was the Flying Scotsman. That got my attention, 'cos I don't remember that one... In fact it was 'Duchess of Montrose' in BR Green. Missing the front bogie, the pony truck and the tender. And, it transpired, the motor. They gave the job to the 'electronics expert' - who repairs radios and so on. He proceeded to strip the motor from a working loco and just stuck it in Montrose. Which they then gave back to the child (who struck me as being a bit odd) still minus tender, bogie and pony truck, with no attempt to clean it up from its rather shabby condition. Then triumphant bleating as it ran round an oval of track on just the driving wheels whilst said kid squealed with delight. When I have seen what the team in the UK version can do I was appalled...

Julie says 'TRY A MAGNET'... duh. It's not steel.

@jamie92208 Chimp question... How can I tell if it's steel? If it is I assume it will bend?

I wonder if I might impose upon the worthies here for some advice, given that we have modellers of skill and resource? My daughter-in-law's father died last year, and she was greatly upset. Last month she visited - he lived in Spain - to find some mementoes to remember him by, only to find that most had been thrown away. She did find, however, a model plane (he was a keen amateur pilot) but in packing it her mother broke it into pieces, bent pieces at that. This is how it is now. It is very heavy, and may have either been a kit, or has been repaired in the past - signs of superglue. What advice would you give a chimp who is desperately keen not to screw this up, as it would mean so much to her to see it fettled and standing on a proper plinth. The metal doesn't seem to be too brittle (I've partly straightened the airscrew with my fingers) but I know how casting metal goes... I've also cleaned and fettled one of his film cameras (Nikon F60) and found a film in it which I've sent off to be processed. I'm planning to use that camera to take a 'family portrait' of Dan & Rebecca and have it framed as a memento. So any sound advice would be extremely appreciated. TIA.

And all good lesson plans, of course.

I have just seen the Governor in Maryland state that 'prayers are working' in the bridge collapse rescue efforts...