Driving your own train is a long-held dream for many of us – yes, even me – so it’s good news that the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway now allows would-be train-drivers to drive their 1925 steam locomotive. The train departs from Oakworth in West Yorkshire, the station which was used in the 1970 film version of E Nesbit’s The Railway Children.
If you don’t fancy driving, you can don a blue boiler-suit and shovel coal into the furnace, or play at being a station master for the afternoon, waving flags and carrying out station duties (like Mr Perks, played by Bernard Cribbins in the film). Or you can just go along for the ride. It’s such a good idea that I can’t think why steam train companies haven’t thought of it before. But it doesn’t come cheap. Being Mr Perks costs £35, but driving the train is a hefty £395.
• Yorkshire Tourist Board, tel 0113 322 3500;
Keighley & Worth Valley Rwy, tel 01535 645 214 www.kwvr.co.uk

 
We are often told that flamingos are only pink because they eat a particular shrimp. But that is not their only idiosyncrasy. They like numbers – and if they are in groups of less than 30 or 40 they tend not to build nests and lay eggs. Colchester Zoo thought long and hard about the problem as their flamingo collection is well under that number, and they hit on the idea of erecting full-length mirrors beside the lake to convince the birds that there are lots of them. It’s worked and they have happily got on with the business of breeding.
• tel 01206 331 292; www.colchester-zoo.co.uk


A couple of years ago, I found an old storm kettle in a junk shop. Storm kettles (basically a tube with a fire-pit underneath) were invented in the Somme trenches and are wonderfully efficient and very simple to use: just stuff some twigs in the bottom and a bit of scrunched-up paper if you have it, light it, and within minutes you’ve got boiling water. I took mine to my sister’s in Denmark at Christmas and we fired it up on a frozen pond for a cuppa. Hawkin’s Bazaar sells them by mail order for £49.99 – pricey, but they are very sturdy and will survive being dropped, frozen or sat on.
• tel 0844 557 5261; www.hawkin.com


Reader Nicholas Buser writes:
I was surprised to learn about the latest US immigration procedures in Toronto, (Out and About, August Oldie). These contrast starkly with my own experience when, on transiting from there to New York 10 years ago, the US authorities seemed to regard any non-Canadian seeking entry via that port as trying to sneak in, and actively discouraged it by intense examination at their Toronto desk, where I was given the 3rd degree treatment by a very bad-tempered young lady. I was then detained in a room for a further, seemingly pointless, ordeal by an equally rude and youthful female, who finally and grudgingly allowed me to board. Had the aircraft not been running late, I would have missed the flight. This was before 9/11 and the subsequent paranoid requirements now demanded of such favoured nations as our own.

It is a pity Homeland Security have acquired the reputation for being so unwelcoming to those wishing to cross their borders. I have no doubt if they learnt to be less so, many more previous regular visitors like myself would be happy to return to see old friends and help boost their undeserving economy – despite their current anti-UK stance.