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I still have the bit of bent bucket handle that was given to me by by the builder who was building the ground floor bedroom extension (for my father, who was by then a wheelchair user) with a single bedroom self-contained flat above for my grandmother (the mad Irish one). I was building a brick-built, curved, raised flower bed, for my father's roses, raised so he could reach them from his wheelchair. I remember building that wall very clearly, as I'd never done any bricklaying before. The builder gave me lots of instruction, and let me use his mixer, whilst my father sat outside watching me, whilst listening to the test match on the radio. Periodically he'd remind me that Churchill (of whom he was a great fan, to the extent of giving me the middle name Spencer............) could lay 400 bricks a day, and I would be lucky to lay 200 a day at the rate I was going. Mind you, I was about 13 years old at the time, so it was misuse of child labour, really. That means I've been carrying around that bit of polished, galvanised, bucket handle for over 50 years, and was using it only a week ago to point up some stone work.

Me too, have never worked out the sentimental attachment to pets. Why can't we have a referendum to ban all pets. Would get my vote.

One thing to watch is VAT receipts. I've spent the last few days collating our VAT reclaim and virtually no ebay sellers give a VAT receipt, and without the supplier's VAT number you cannot make a claim, I've found. I'd guess we've "lost" a fair bit of VAT as a consequence of this, as I bought quite a lot of electrical stuff (loads of Crabtree Starbreaker RCBOs, for example) from ebay. The same goes for Fastlec and TLC, they give you a VAT receipt most of the time, but I've had 2 or 3 receipts from both these companies that were emailed with no VAT number.

Have a look at these 2 suppliers: http://www.ukelectricalsupplies.com/ http://www.fastlec.co.uk/

First, if you want dry lining boxes, then without a shaddow of doubt get Appleby. They never give trouble, unlike some other makes which can be dire. I buy a lot of stuff from CPC, and I also use Screwfix (electricfix), toolstation, and TLC direct. I also buy a surprising amount from ebay, e.g I can't find anywhere else where I can get smoke heat and CO alarms as cheap.

For my stonework jointers, I used to bend a very shallow S in 15mm copper pipe to get the right serpentine curve, then beat flat the pointing end and round. A bit fat for brick pointing, but great for stonework. Far better than the stock ones you could buy from the BMs.

That looks nothing like the handles on the 99p buckets I buy from Jewson's

Great tip! I have a job to do replacing the battery in an iPad, and was not looking forward to prising the case apart, even though I have a set of tools to do it. I reckon a couple of bits Siga tape stuck either side should be a great help in separating the two halves of the case.

We have more than enough nutters here making the news that we don't need to include any from the rest of the UK.

I've done 3 doors recently with the stuff from Amazon It is quite easy to do if you follow the instructions, get a decent squeegee and use plenty of soapy water....! Its difficult to comprehend but you spray the soapy water on the adhesive side of the film too ...! Makes it move a bit and then you squeegee out the air and the water and it sticks...