- Every bothered to look at a £2 coin properly? Personally I usually spend it rather than looking at it, but on some of them around the edge is a great quote by Sir Isaac Newton, acknowledging the debt he owed to other scientists: ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’.
- Ever wondered what the most popular street name is in the US? When my son asked me this, I automatically, and rather cleverly I thought, told him it must be first street. Apparently though, first street is often renamed eg Broadway so the most popular street name in the US is actually second street!
- You can remove dents in your carpet – those pesky things that appear when you decide to shift the sofa a few feet – by using ice cubes. Now I haven’t tried this yet, so please don’t shout at me if it doesn’t work, but his weekend I’m going to give it a go. According to the clip I cut out of the Daily Mail on Monday, all you need to do is put an ice cube into the dents and let it melt – preferably overnight. Then gently lift the carpet fibres with the help of a fork. The fibres should slowly absorb the water, making them swell back to normal size. The bigger the dent, the more ice cubes you need.
- The final thing I learnt this week is that salt water corrodes locks much faster than you think. We rent a tatty beach hut on the South coast and even though there is nothing in it bar a few moldy deckchairs, we have padlocked it up. Sunday arrived and with it a cloudless blue sky. This can be one of those very rare occasions that we’ll use our beach hut, we thought. An hour later, we’d squirted suntan lotion and baby oil into the lock but still hadn’t been able to open it. Thankfully an experienced beach hut owner came by. ‘All you need are some tools.’ He produced a can of WD40 and a hammer from his bag and, hey presto, the lock opened! We spent a blissful few minutes staring at the view below. Then of course the wind picked up and it was time to go home…!