There is often chlorine residue, salts  and other contaminants  in tap water. Gently swirl coins around in distilled water, to rinse them is a good option. Please only do this one coin at a time.

Pat, rather than rub, with paper towels until dry. Make sure all coins are absolutely bone dry before storing or displaying them.

Just imagine the kids play up and the entire 747 cabin is kept awake by your precious little darlings. Nobody on that flight will forgive you and if some of them are in your hotel, well… you won’t be making too many friends on that holiday.

There is no right age for taking children on long haul air travel. It is all about the temperament of the individual child. Take a good critial look at your own young uns and then decide whether to let them on a long distance flight.

From the age of about 5 they can start to take an active role and by the age of 16 they may be mature enough to do it all themselves.

However there are a few pointers to bare in mind regardless of their age.

1) Good curtains keep out early morning sunshine, which helps them get a good night sleep.

2) Fitted Wardrobes, cupboards and drawers have more storage capacity than their stand-alone counterparts. It seems you can never have enough storage space when there are kids about.

3) Colours really do matter. They strongly affect mood. Keep the kids happy and relaxed at bedtime with warm muted tones and not too many vibrant primary colours.

4) Never let a teenager spray paint their bedroom black. They will be leaving home soon and they can do that when they are paying mortgage or rent, but not in your house. This should be a non-negitionable stance.

Do not believe that homemade cards from spurious institutions will fool anyone. The savings an ISIC gives you are amazing, particularly when looking for cheap international student flights and accomodation. ISIC cards are not free, but cost approximately the same as a cinema ticket.  You will need proof of your student status and various other documents. Go to the ISIC website for more details.

However whoever you decide to vote for, you really should vote. Too many people died to get you the right to vote for you to throw it away. 99% of us were not rich and happy. We (our ancestors) were almost all the poor and oppressed.  But our great great grandparents fought for the right to have a say in how the country is run and as a result we are immeasurably richer. No matter how opressed and powerless you might feel, just compare your life to one in a land where the people cannot choose their leaders and you will see how much better off you are.

The simplest lens filters are known as window glass filters and are really only there to protect expensive coated lenses from accidental damage.

Next, and very popular are skylight filters and they cut out some ultraviolet wavelengths from reaching the camera lens. This enhances blue skies a little and skylight filters are often left in-situ by owners, attached permanently to a lens as an additional protective layer, similar to a window glass filter.

Coloured filters were commonly used in black and white photography to either boost or reduce contrast. However since the advent of digital darkrooms, sales of coloured filters have dropped dramatically.

By contrast, sales of polarising filters have remained strong. This is because the effects that are achieved with a polarised lens (reducing reflections from some surfaces, removing glare and boosting saturated skies by eliminating unwanted reflections) are the photography effects that really cannot be faked in a computer on photoshop.

Neutral density filters are also still sold. They reduce the amount of light that comes in to the camera and allow the photographer to play around with much longer exposures than would otherwise be possible.  They are available both as uniform density and graduated density where the top or bottom of the filter is darker than the other end. These are traditionally a tool of landscape photographers who use graduated neutral density filters to get full detail in a landscape without ‘blowing’ the highlights in the clouds. The darker end of the filter covers the clouds so that the exposure can be set for the ground properly.

Finally, the world of close-up or macro photography is where you find people using closeup filters. These work in the same way as a pair of reading glasses. They are small curved lenses that slightly enlarge the image before it enters the standard camera lens. Multiple closeup filters are sometimes screwed on top of each other to get even higher magnifications.

Well I had this problem when mine split and am pleased to tell you that Bostik Soft Plastics glue is perfect for the job.

I bought a tube in the DIY stor for £2 and fixed my £100 boots perfectly.

Apply the glue to both sides of the split seam, wait 5-10 mins as per the instructions and then hold together. I used clothespegs and left them overnight, although bulldog clips or clamps would be just as good.

24 hours later my DMs were as good as new.

If you don’t sweep you risk a chimney fire which could endanger your home.

Chimney Sweeping is not a particularly skilled job and the person who does it will not charge a big fee.

Of course, if you see a set of chimney brushes for sale, you could do it yourself.

Most people associate autumn with mushrooms and while it is true this is when may appear, the truth is that outside the depths of winter, mushrooms grow pretty much all year round.

The difference between a shroom and a toadstool is easy.  There isn’t one. Both words are interchangeable although no edible mushrooms appear to be named as toadstools in popular culture.

Ultimately switch when you are no longer happy with the quality of shots you produce in your little camera.You can take better shots with a dSLR for many reasons.

Firstly, in cameras, size matters. All digital cameras have a sensor in the back but not all sensors are the same. Even if a compact camera’s sensor has 10 megapixels, the chances are that the sensor size will be around five times smaller than a 10 megapixel digital SLR. You simply get  sharper images with better colour fidelity and less ‘noise’ from a larger sensor.

Secondly you have far more control over the shots with a digital SLR. Small automatic cameras have to make choices about exposure, aperture and other aspects that are artisitic choices. The automatic software is great for snaps, but if you want to creatively decide on the mood of a photo it is easiest to control aperture, exposure and so on manually.

You can swap lenses. There are hardly any compact cameras with interchangeable lenses. Switching from a telephoto to a macro radically changes the type of shot you can achieve. Yes, your compact camera has a macro function and a ‘10x optical zoom’ sticker on the side, but the inbuilt lens just cannot compete with a good set of lenses. High Quality changeable lenses are really very much better than ‘all purpose lenses’

You can shoot in the RAW which is nothing to do with going out in your birthday suit but everything to do with an absolutely brilliant feature of digital SLR cameras.  As the name implies, RAW files are the raw data recorded by the sensor.  Jpegs by contrast have already been processed by the camera before saving. However there are many ways of processing a shot and all of them mean the camera has to ditch data, compress files, muck around with colours and generally monkey about with the scene. If you save a file in RAW format you have the luxury of making all the key decisions at your leisure whilst sitting in front of your computer. Only once you are happy with brightness and colour cast do you ‘process’ the image into a jpg file for printing or uploading to the web.

The first time I saw what shooting in RAW format allowed me to achieve I was dumbfounded. I promised myself two things. Firstly never to shoot pictures in JPEG again and secondly to tell everyone I could about just how fantastically happy I am that I switched from a compact digital camera to a digital SLR. So, that is why I wrote this article.