Disposal of Mercury

[John Rumm]

Perhaps we never kept any that long ;-)

[Arfa Daily]

I know that I never did. It was made, splatted around, and detonated by unsuspecting souls within hours ... !!

Arfa

[Arfa Daily]

Actually, Watney's Red Barrel wasn't too bad for a lolly-water 'ordinary'. Remember Red Barrel key-rings ? About the same time as Esso men, and Red X key-rings. And tiger tails that you tied on your filler cap (I've got a tiger in my tank) and bullet holes that you stuck on your car windows ? I digress. ISTR that Red Barrel dropped the "Barrel" later, and became just "Watney's Red". Perhaps I thought it was ok because I grew up on the stuff. Almost all of the pubs in Northampton at the time were NBC (Watney's) tied houses, so there wasn't a lot of choice. Few Charlie Wells if you hunted them out. Couple of Youngers and a Courage or two ...

Arfa

[PeterC]

Now in Ashton, so just a bus ride from heaven. That must be the Wathen Wagg (or summat like that) bridge. I use it quite often to get to Morrisons. The 'fun' part of Morrisons - Malt Shovel - bus stop is crossing Cattle Market Road twice, especially the second time!

[PeterC]

To be fair, Watney did start the long, slow death of crappy beer and caused CAMRA. Now we have decent beer and, just in Northants, many micro-breweries. So many beers, so little time.

[PeterC]

Or like awnings for caravans: can o' piss.

[charles]

[Snip]

Of course, Northampton did have Phipps brewery, but ISTR, it got taken over by Carlsberg and stopped brewing real beer. We went there from school (c1957). At the time their suplus yeast went to make Marmite.

[Huge]

I've bought fireworks from his firm, at least when it was allowed, before morons started blowing their heads off with professional grade mortars.

[Lobster]

OK, I think that's my cue to pull my ammonium tri-iodide / toilet story from the archives, for anyone who hasn't seen it...:)

David

[Bill]

In message , Lobster writes

On a slightly different tack, but equally amusing, but not at the time, and certainly not now that I am a responsible adult of course......

While in the 6th for at school we had been given a gas liquid chromatograph by a local company, at about the same time we had also been given the contents of a local research companies labs. Lots and lots of brown glass bottles of various interesting substances.

Any way being in a hurry to play with the GLC, we tried it without fitting the exhaust pipe work to a suitable external vent. We ran a few substances through it and got the expected traces on the plotter, then came a bottle that we didn't recognise, in it went, I never actually saw the plot because all of a sudden my eyes closed up, as did those of the other guy in the room. we managed to make it out of the room, more by feel than anything else, and get to a wash room and rinse our eyes out. When we regained our sight we noticed that there was a large number of pupils all standing around outside rubbing their eyes too. Plus a couple of rather pissed off teachers. We'd managed to empty the whole block of classrooms.

Apparently what ever it was we had put through the GLC was the main constituent part of a WW1 tear gas, it was certainly effective.

The chemistry teacher believed us when we said it was not intentional and promptly disposed of the remainder of the chemical by pouring it down the drain...

How things have changed over the years...................

[PeterC]

Phipps beer is being sold again; not made in N'pton but somewhere esle (Rutland?).

[Arfa Daily]

So are you are Northampton lad as well ? Still here ? I'd forgotten about the Phipps name. What was the tie-in with NBC? When Calsberg arrived and built their (at the time) very futuristic concrete brewery, was it on NBC / Watney / (Phipps?) land or was it just coincidentally 'next door' ? I always remember that whole 'block' between the river and St Peter's Way being a centre for brewing, but maybe not ? Maybe Carlsberg was on 'new' land in the block ? On the Marmite connection, I always thought that it was a very specific yeast that they used that was only 'bred' by Davenport of "Beer at home means Davenport" fame, and I had a feeling that I had read or seen somewhere that with the demise of that company, Marmite were the only ones keeping that particular strain alive now.

Arfa

[charles]

sorry, no.

[geoff]

If anyone passes through Orlingbury - is the old post office (where I grew up) still there

[geoff]

In message , charles writes

Bloody forriners

>

[geoff]

Don't remember that one, but interesting to note that some of us are repeating exactly the same stories in this thread that we told 9 years ago

[geoff]

In message , Arfa Daily writes

No wonder kids today go around vandalising things - that's all the excitement they get in their otherwise cosseted lives

>

[John Williamson]

The beauty of Google Earth is that if you remember the layout of the village, you can check for yourself. The aerial views available in the history line date from 1945, 2004, and couple of more recent ones. Streetview is from 2009.

It looks a nice little place.

[Arfa Daily]

Orlingbury is, of course just a mile or two up the road from Barton. I'm fairly sure that the Post Office was still there last time I went through, but I could be wrong. I'll have a look next time

Arfa

[Andrew Gabriel]

Don't need to boil - just add a little potassium iodide, which makes the iodine react with ammonia quite quickly at room temp.

Apparently (according to wikipedia), even a alpha particle can trigger it.