Biggles wrote:And if you don't have 5 hours (AFAIK) in the preceeding 12 months you need a check flight with an instructor even if your license is still valid. If you drink a beer with your right hand 3 months prior to a flight you need to hop on your left leg 6 times before you can fly with a pax.

By law, if you don't have 3 landings in the 3 months prior to your flight, you may not take a passenger. As you are not current on your license on type.
The 5 hour thing is by all accounts a redundant piece of law that means nothing any more. You are now forced to be signed out by an instructor for a license renewal. Before this law was enforced, if you had flown 5 hours in the year preceding your renewal (I actually think that it was 3 hours), you could just make a copy of your logbook, and pay the money, and you had yourself a license. Even if you have flown 100 hours in the year before your renewal, you still need to be signed out by an instructor on the current law.
I think the current interpretation on the law, and I may need some help here, is that if you didn't fly the 5 hours, you need an instructor to check you out and then fly the 5 hours PIC before you will get your renewal.
By all accounts, this is the safer way to go.