Dee

Cheap test before anyone spends money, and it narrows it in about a minute.

Next time it does the pause, have someone turn the key while you listen at the engine bay — specifically for a single small click from a relay in the fuse box at the moment you turn the key, versus at the moment it finally cranks.

• Click when you turn the key, then a pause, then crank → the relay is doing its job and the delay is downstream of it.
• No click until the moment it cranks → the delay is upstream: the switch, the wiring to the relay, or a safety switch not making contact.

That one observation splits the possibilities in half and it costs nothing. Do it before replacing a starter motor, which is the expensive thing people replace first and it is usually not the starter.

What your own grated cheese loses is mostly moisture, and the mechanism is surface area.

A 200g block has maybe a few square centimetres of exposed face. Grate it and you have created an enormous surface, all of it losing water to the air. Within a couple of days the outside of every shred is dry, which is why it goes hard and why the shreds stick to each other — the surfaces dry, then fuse where they touch.

It also oxidises faster for the same reason, so a strong cheese will taste flatter and a mild one can pick up a slightly stale note. Neither is a safety issue and both are mild compared to the drying.

So the answer to 2 is: mostly moisture, and the fix is a moisture problem, not a preservation problem.

Answering 3 directly: yes, and the reason is what a flat battery is, not what it is missing.

A lead-acid battery left deeply discharged starts forming hard sulphate crystals on the plates. Recharging promptly reverses most of that; leaving it partially charged lets it set. A battery that is habitually run to 80% and topped back to 90% by driving is quietly losing capacity, and you find out on the first genuinely cold morning.

So an overnight charge after a flat battery is not belt-and-braces, it is the part that undoes the damage. It costs you nothing but the socket.

And worth saying: something flattened it. If you left a light on, fine. If nothing was left on, then either the battery is at the end of its life or something is draining it, and a charger will not fix either of those — it just delays the next time you need a jump.

The asymmetry explains why it felt heavy pulling the cage forward by hand and normal when riding. I was testing it in exactly the direction it is designed to resist.