one of those metail things that you can attach to one wooden gate that flips ofer to another wooden gate by the side of it to keep them together? Does anyone know what they are called?
If you've got no uppy bits, then you can't use a drop-over. Suppose you tie a piece of string into a loop about a foot wide, and screw a screw or hook into one side gate. Then you thread the loop through the other gate and hook the two ends of the string onto the screw or hook?
PS: As someone who used to be in charge of Yellow Pages deliveries across large parts of East Anglia (as well as delivering Thomson Local directories, Thomson Business Pages and BT phone books), I've had to walk down thousands of driveways myself and have frequently encountered those type of latches completely sans 'uppy bits'.
one of the gates has dropped a little and the bolt no longer lines up, so the bolt solution (which was tricky for the person anyway) has now become impossible. Even if the bolt solution could be fixed by rehanging the gate or moving it up on the dropped side, it's not really viable long term
bednobs, if you really needed it today (i.e. yesterday) then you could have gone out and sorted it with a bit of string before you went to bed last night.