These are two inexpensive things I have come across this year that proved to be transforming.
First, is a little black thingumajig about the size of a Monte Cristo No. 4. When going out I pick up my mobile and, inevitably, the battery is low. This little thingy is a spare battery that you plug in and the ‘phone works all day. Then it is simplicity itself to recharge it ready for the next emergency. Don’t be tempted by bigger, more powerful and expensive versions: they do not fit in a coat pocket or handbag so conveniently.
On the right is a bottle of Glycerin; add nitric acid and (carefully) mix with sodium nitrate and you have a pretty good bomb in your hands. Alternatively, if you happen to own an oldish car, you already have an old banger and the glycerine can be more usefully deployed. Use it to wipe around the rubber window seals and it discourages all that mossy stuff that flourishes on my fifteen year old barouche. Somewhat surprisingly, glycerine can be bought at Boots, no questions asked.
Speaking of Boots, I am reminded of William Boot and his preparations to go to Ishmaelia as The Beast’s Foreign Correspondent in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Lord Copper, megalomanic press baron, instructs him to “Travel Light and Be Prepared”. Miss Barton, having arranged to have a selection of polo and hockey sticks cloven for him (Boot has been advised by Lord Copper that he will need cleft sticks for his dispatches) at a thinly disguised Army & Navy Stores additionally sells him:
“A tent, three months’ rations, a collapsible canoe, a jointed flagstaff and Union Jack, a hand-pump and sterilising plant, an astrolabe, six suits of tropical linen and a sou’-wester, a camp operating table and set of surgical instruments, a portable humidor, guaranteed to preserve cigars in condition in the Red Sea, and a Christmas hamper complete with Santa Claus costume and a tripod mistletoe stand, and a cane for whacking snakes….at the last moment he added a coil of rope and a sheet of tin.”