Do you charge more, or change lights for flashlight season?

My home town is at precisely 55 degrees North.

It’s the most northerly city in England, but Scotland and the islands extend much further North.

On December 21 sunset will be at 15:39, and daylight will last 7 hours 10 minutes. The sun will barely rise above the horizon.

However, at mid-summer, it is wonderful, and never really gets dark.

A few days per year we get a good display of the Northern Lights.

Scandinavians have even more extreme seasons, I hope to take my campervan to the Nordkapp next summer.

Thanks to the Gulf Stream, or North Atlantic Drift, and where it fetches up on the west coast of Scotland in places they can grow palm trees and create sub-tropical botanic gardens.

E.g. Logan Botanic Garden | Visit | Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

In these few favoured spots on the west coast it never really freezes. I hope to retire there.

Elsewhere it can get bitterly cold, but nothing like Canada, where I have spent a few winters at much lower latitudes.

We also have weather here, not climate, and are rather obsessed with it. Rightly so.

Torches are quite useful at this time of year, not just playthings.

Nope. I just carry an 18650 torch with an AAA backup, one spare battery for each, and when one of them gets dim, I switch batteries and the discharged one becomes the spare. It’s a year round thing, so nothing to it when the days get a little bit shorter. shrug

As funny as it sounds I only use my edc lights during the day (at work)so hours of darkness dont really come into play.
BLF A6 with 18350 battery .I much prefer the small size of the 18350 but of course runtime suffers compared to 18650. In winter I just throw a few spare batteries into my lunch bag.

Newcastle or maybe Sunderland ?? 10 years here and I’m still learning.

For the rest of the Americans, UK city status is granted by the monarch and not by size. London is just confusing.

Ha ha. This.

I also use my lights during the day. And as the days get shorter I use them more.

Whoa. Looks like someone’s cat was “kneading” on a keyboard…

I have several lights with dedicated sets of cells that stay in them whenever they aren’t being charged (BLF Q8 and Fireflies ROT66), but for everything else I maintain a rotating stock of GAs and VTC6s. Lights I use regularly always have cells in them to rotate out, but everything else is stored empty. Why would you want your spare 18650s slowly dying in unused lights?

Same here. Easier to keep track of, too.

they were in use until the past year when I got more about 6 more batteries and lights, didnt have the need to store them separately before this

That’s all?? Bah. I could do that standing on my head. :smiley:

Today I jumped up from a 18350 Armytek Prime to a Convoy M2. It went un-noticed. I am also on day 5 of caring my wallet in my front pocket. No issues with M2 and wallet, they got along fine. I do have large pockets.

Geez I thought my collection was pretty big, there are a lot of AAA AA and 123’s, gotta be between 40-50ish, probably nothing compared to what some BLFers have

Gotta buy in bulk. :smiley:

I really gotta try the M2. Hopefully it’s more pocket-friendly than the sharp edged M1.

The northernmost town in England is Berwick upon Tweed.

In fact a large chunk of Scotland actually lies south of Newcastle and Berwick.

West Hartlepool. Durham Was my start off point in life.
Too bloody cold for me.
Back in the ‘40’s/’50’s. we used to rake the “seacoal” off the beaches as tide dropped.
pack in rolls of newspaper. dry it. Then sell it (coal logs) to buy food.
Plus burn on fires in Winter to heat the house.
We were Mining. Heavy Industry. Shipyards and coal loading port from all the colliery’s.
Type in Google… West Hartlepool or Hartlepool in the ’40’/50’s. and look at the air we breathed.
born and bred in. Left there at 13 yrs old. 77 yr now and I still cough and wheeze.

That old Welsh Railway Station.
They used to issue Platform tickets if you went there yrs (decades) ago.
as Novelty/Souvenirs.
And most cut out the centre of it when talking about the place.
LLanfair-Gogoch from memory we called it.
Quaint li’l old place.

Fascinating. Had to look up “seacoal”…

http://www.scottishheritage.net/seacoal.html

At first I thought it might be a nickname for, unno, clumps of seaweed which could be dried and burned as fuel.

Guess it’s not just anthracite?

Aah, a Mackem :wink: You did well to get out.

My great grandad was a miner, in the great depression he walked (literally) two hundred miles South to find work, ending up with two shillings in his pocket, stood in line for work, and worked his way up from there. Wooed my great grandma. became highly respected, invested in a charabanc to take the miners to and from work, expanded, ended up owning the local bus and tram company, and a millionaire. In those days.

Never lost his roots though, when there was a mine disaster, which happened, regularly, he was the expert in sorting things out, calmly, and did the brutal work himself. E.g. if it was too dangerous to shoot the trapped pit ponies, he would have to strangle them with an iron bar and a chain. On his own, he was the last to leave.

Dropped down dead at 96, digging his vegetable garden (he grew all his own food). Still living extremely modestly, with one daughter helping. Way to go.

Sent my Grandad, his son, to University, who became a Doctor and consultant to the Sheffield steel industry and contributed hugely to metallurgy, which was vital during WWII.

I won’t bother you with the next two generations.

You are correct, it is very cold at home, where most of my family and friends still live, which is why I now live on the south coast, but am fortunate to also have other options to drift between, from the Yorkshire Dales, to North Norfolk, Southwest France and central Switzerland. None of my doing, just some very good friends.

Europe and Scandinavia is just such a marvellous place, so open and free, such history and heritage and beauty and meeting of minds, and mixing of people, interesting and informed generally, so sad the way things are going at the moment, it feels like a very dark sinister cloud falling down.

How did this happen ? (and please don’t mention the Trump and Merkel words).

Our pathetic UK “leadership” has left us rudder-less. Sorry, some of this may have drifted off into politics, if so please dis-regard.