Clive Mitchell wrote...
Subsequently my mum foolishly gave me a battery and torch lamp to play
with and it all went wrong from there.

I wonder how I managed to survive! My grandparents had a drawer full of
mains plugs and sockets that they used to give me to play with as a toddler.
That was fine but, sometime between the ages of 5 and 10, I gleefully
discovered a similar stash in my father's workshop but together with lamps
and cable! I had many happy hours making little projects to impress my
mates, such as a warning system with a switch on the roof and lamp in the
workshop. Occasional short-circuits and flashes and bangs only added to the
fun but fortunately for me my early electrical career was prematurely
terminated when my father discovered that an old radio had miraculously come
back to life and found it's plug to be wired between live and earth!
Somehow he didn't see the funny side and certainly didn't appreciate my
research approach to working out which wire should go to which pin!

BTW does anyone happen to know what the Sheffield supply voltage was back in
the 1950s - I remember a van coming down the street and engineers converting
all our appliances to work on 240V AC but for the life of me I can't
remember what it was before that.

David