Mangelwurzels were and still are grown as animal feed, as large roots, many rural museums contain a variety of large knives and hand cranked devices for chopping the large roots into cow and horse sized morsels. They are sometimes sown in late summer and grown as a fodder crop for sheep which graze the leaves off and fertilise the ground before cultivating and sowing a spring crop. Apparently humans can eat them both root and leaves when small. I would expect them to be high fibre. My mother never mentioned them as anything other than animal food and she grew up in rural Lincolnshire pre WWII. A slice of sugar beet was sometimes sucked/chewed as a sweet.
Turning the stereo on and wondering why there was no sound; checking various things and then realising I'd turned the volume down with the remote to answer a phonecall and not turned it back up afterwards.
Not mine, but a friend was off on holiday and set the clock radio really early to wake them in time to leave for the airport. Didn’t wake until the phone went, their fellow travellers were at the airport and wondering where they were. By some miracle, they managed to throw the kids and luggage into the car and got to the airport in the nick of time. Turned out they had set the radio to their usual channel, but hadn’t realised that it didn’t broadcast through the night. The static /white noise didn’t wake them. Put the shivers up my spine. I now set both our phones and both iPads just in case. Too many of mine to wade through yet. Latest was spooning coffee grounds straight into my mug instead of the cafetière next to it.
We had a similar panic one year. We were going on holiday with a friend. Early flight so she stayed at our house overnight. We all had alarms set, and all turned over when they went off, thinking somebody else would get up first. When one of us finally spotted the time, we were all dressed, car loaded, and on our way to the airport in 10 minutes. It was only due to the fact that we had built in 'slack' to the journey time to the airport that we made the flight.
The timer started ticking again in the vicinity of the microwave. Fool me once! I have eviscerated it. The battery might come in useful some time. The timer - never.
We spend a whole evening wondering what the little beep we occasionally heard was. It wasn’t very loud, and not that frequent or regular. Checked all the usual suspects but couldn’t find any obvious cause. It wasn’t until I had popped into the kitchen last thing at night when the lights were off. Noticed what looked like a reflection of light on a chest of drawers in the living room, thought nothing of it until it suddenly went out. Inside the drawer was my old Nokia phone. No longer working as the number has been transferred to my new phone, but I hadn’t bothered to switch it off. The occasional beep was the low battery warning. I’ve now charged it up again! Apparently it can still be used for 999 calls, I can use it as a torch, and if I ever get mugged and forced to hand my phone over, it will have to make the sacrifice!
I knew someone who bought a job lot of smoke detectors and put them under the stairs in a carrier bag and forgot about them. You know the rest of the story.....
How does an escaped gardening glove work it's way down to the bottom of the wheelie bin? And whose bright idea was it to make gardening kit green or brown? I want my kit to be dayglow orange or high viz yellow. And if it flashes when you whistle, that'd be fine. If they can do it for phones, why not secateurs?
There are builders grade cheap gloves. Bright orange rubber palms, you should be able to see them even on a grey day.
