General

Know The Difference With Your Cylinder Locks

You’re probably seen the John Lewis advert by now and, even if not, you can’t have escaped at least knowing about it. It features Elton John and travels back in time to see how all his success can, at least in part, be traced back to when he was given a gift of a piano as a child. Now you may not know, but this wasn’t the first draft of this advert because originally it was an advert created by myself, and this is how it unfolded.

Why you choose a local Rotherham locksmith

One of my favourite British films is the 1983 comedy drama, Local Hero, directed by Bill Forsyth. If you haven’t seen it, I can tell you that it’s delightfully charming, and depicts the conflict between a local community in a small Scottish village, and a major international oil company who want to buy up land for a refinery. It stars Burt Lancaster and Peter Capaldi, amongst others, and the soundtrack was written by Mark Knopfler – the main theme is used by Newcastle United at every home game when the teams run out onto the pitch. 

I was watching the film again recently and it got me thinking about the representation of the clash between local and international and how it relates to my own work. Now, shocking as it may seem, I’m not Burt Lancaster, so I’m firmly in the “local” category rather than the national or international conglomerate. However, I’m in an industry which encompasses both the local and the national. This can be illustrated through a simple web search for locksmiths. The results will include a mix of local and national results to choose from. Often the national firms will appear in the sponsored results because their marketing budgets are so much bigger. But which to choose? 

Looking for shed, garden and garage security advice

Right, I don’t want to get too controversial but blimey Charlie, it hasn’t half been hot this week. Was it really only a couple of months ago we were having late winter snow, or did I dream that? Looking at the forecast, it seems there won’t be any let up in the hot weather for at least the next week, so I guess we’d better just accept it and enjoy it/cope with it the best we can. Although if you could kindly refrain from going around the supermarket without your tops on, I’d be every so grateful. And the same goes for the men, too. 

Locksmith advice for preventing being locked out

I think we can safely say summer is here. The evidence is overwhelming: we’ve had at least 4 days of sunshine, oddly coinciding with the May bank holidays which was a most bewildering phenomenon, and now with thunderstorms on the horizon and a couple of England batting collapses already behind us in the cricket, it looks like we’re settled in for a typically British summer. 

A thief's way of thinking!

Well hello there. It’s Fingers McGhee here, your friendly neighbourhood burglar. The locksmith chap has been kind enough to let me have a guest blog this month. He may live to regret this as I feel he’s had it his own way for too long. I’m not happy about the way he’s been passing on tips on how to help secure your homes and properties. So to help balance things, I’ll be listing my own tips today on how you can make my life just that bit easier. You know it makes sense after all. 

Going on holiday? A bit of security advice

Blimey Charlie, that was a bit of a week with the snow then wasn’t it? I trust we all survived the wintry weather, our locks are all unfrozen, and that we are now looking forward to a bit of sunshine, come the Spring. And in the spirit of looking forward to the warmer weather, today I’ll look ahead to the holiday season. Yes, summer is still a fair way away, but Easter is just around the corner which means many people will be going away on holiday. And as we know, this causes issues when it comes to our home security. 

One of the best defences against burglaries is our very presence. You can have all the locks, gadgets and booby traps you want, but an unoccupied house is always going to be a more tempting prospect for a criminal than one where people are living and able to defend their property or raise the alarm. As such, when you go away for any period on time, it’s even more important to do all you can to ensure your home is protected in your absence. I’ll list a few steps you can take below so that if you’re away to warmer climes this Easter, you can ensure you’ve left your house as safe as possible.

Security tips when moving into a new home

Hello there and welcome to the Valentine’s Day special of the blog. How is it a Valentine’s Day special, I hear you ask? And there you have me beaten, because it isn’t. But everyone else is doing bloody Valentine’s Day tie-ins so I thought if you can’t beat them, join them. It’s now gone a bit wrong though as I don’t even have the most tenuous of links between Valentine’s and the subject of this month’s blog. I guess mentioning Valentine’s 5 times in the first paragraph sort of counts. But there the mentions end. 

So, moving on anyway.. ooh, and an apt choice of words there, almost as if I planned it, because today I’ll be talking about the process of moving house, specifically in terms of the security side of things. As well as being one of the most stressful things you can do, moving house can also be an exciting step, but you don’t want that excitement to be quickly quelled by easily avoidable security worries. 

The various lock types used on modern doors

Should Auld Acquaintance be forgot. And never brought to la...de..la..de laa. Well, I remembered the first line about forgetting, and ironically forgot the rest. But anyway, a very happy 2018 to you. We’re living in the future now. Yet still no flying cars, robot butlers or jetpacks – I’m beginning to think we were lied to about those. 

Speaking of lying, that’s one thing I won’t be doing in this blog (you’ll note my New Year’s resolution to avoid tenuous segues has already been broken) which I intend to act as a reminder about a topic I may well have covered once or twice in the past. This subject is, of course, locks. It’s kind of what I do. I could start writing a blog about the early 20th economist, John Maynard Keynes, but quite honestly I’m more confident in my knowledge of locks rather than early 20th Century economic theory. 

So, to ease us all into another lock-filled year, I’ll take a quick look at the locks we’re all the most familiar with – those on our own front doors. It might be a bit late for the New Year’s Eve quizzes we all enjoyed, testing us on the subject of deadlocks and night latches, but you can always remember the information for next year in order to be the coolest person at the party. 

Advice on hiding keys

I was thinking the other day about how I used to play hide and seek as a kid. I was never the best at it – always chose the same hiding place and should really have been easily found. Weirdly, it often took my parents an unusually long time to find me. In fact, once, when I was in the usual hiding place of under my bed, it took them two whole weeks to find me. I was proud of myself that summer, until it later emerged they’d actually gone to Tenerife for a fortnight and used the game as a pretext to leave me at home. But anyway, that story is for another day. What it does bring us on to is the subject of hiding which is what I’ll be talking about today. Not so much hiding ourselves on this occasion, but rather hiding the keys to your house. 

I’ll start off by saying that hiding your keys for yourself or others to find and let themselves into your house is NEVER to be recommended.  Keep them with you at all times, and if you have spare sets, make sure they’re locked away in your house. If you have sets of keys hidden outside so that family members or friends can easily get them and let themselves into the house, you run a very high risk of someone much more unwelcome finding them, and being able to help themselves to the belongings in your home. To illustrate, here are a few places that you might think are handy places to leave your keys, but trust me – they really aren’t.

Security advice for the summer

“We’re all going on a Summer holiday, No more working for a week or two, fun and laughter on our summer holiday, no more worries for....” Oh shut up, Cliff. We aren’t all on holidays, you know. Bloody Cliff, always making assumptions for me or you, that’s him. But anyway, as he brought it up, yes it does seem to be the time of year when a lot of people are jetting off to sunnier climes. Climes, that’s an odd word, isn’t it. Climes. Climes. Say it often enough and it loses all meaning. Climes. Climes. I think I need a holiday myself.