Interesting Facts

According to wine expert Jancis Robinson, author of The 24 Hour Wine Expert, any open bottle of wine – even a red – should be kept in the fridge. (Seemingly the old adage of serving red wine at "room temperature" was coined before the advent of central heating. Nowadays room temperature tends to be too warm, and we are drinking tepid red wine. According to the experts, refrigerating lighter reds such as beaujolais and pinot noir brings out all their fresh fruit flavours, and full-bodied reds such as cabernet sauvignon, shiraz and malbec benefit from being served cooler (around 17 or 18°C). Of course, it's unlikely we have any left in the bottle to store, but I'm going to try out this advice this weekend. ) 

Apart from its great name, Miserden in Gloucestershire is interesting because, according to cable.co.uk, it has the worst broadband in the UK. (The fastest place in the UK was Rickmansworth with download speeds of over 77Mbps, but Miserden is a digital black hole where only 17% of villagers are able to access superfast broadband, and the rest have to make do with average download speeds of 1.3Mbps.  One poor resident recorded a "staggeringly low" speed of 0.12Mbps, it would be faster to send a letter! At that rate the company worked out that it would take residents of Miserden 11 hours to download a high def version of the latest Bond film, Sceptre. Amusingly, they would get faster broadband if they moved to Everest base camp!)

According to a report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, the Saturday job is dead. (In the 90s, nearly half of sixth-formers (16-17-year-old students) in the UK had a Saturday job, but that number had fallen to 18% by 2014. Now, before you say it's because youths of today are a bunch of lazy so and sos, it seems it's because they prefer to spend their time studying.  And they could well be right for doing so, as research from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex found that taking a part-time job  while studying for exams, helped students gain work skills and pocket money for those teenage essentials, but had a negative impact on their exam results. I would still take a Saturday job.  No one cares about your exam results after a few years, but people always value experience.) Source

Here's a scary statistic: According to crime figures, there has been a 60% rise in the number of children in the UK being investigated by police for violent crimes against their parents. (The number of suspects aged 17 or under in the Metropolitan Police area rose to 1,437 in 2014 from 895 in 2012. The youngest was just seven. I'm not sure what you can do if your own child attacks you. There's even a helpline, Parentline Plus, for parents who face this kind of abuse. Scary!)

A cinema in Malvern, Worcestershire has replaced its seats because British bottoms are getting wider. (The Grade II-listed cinema in Malvern has had to remove 380 of their 17" wide seats because the average cinema-goer no longer fits in them. A spokesman said: “We haven’t had anyone stuck but it can happen.” I think they should let it happen.  Getting winched out of a cinema seat might just be the incentive someone needs to bypass the popcorn stand on their way in.)

Around 5000 people need treatment in hospital for severe allergic reactions each year in the UK. (Sadly some cases are fatal, causing an average of 10 deaths annually. According to the European Academy of Allergy, food allergies affect more than 17 million people across Europe. It reminds me of the story in the UK , about the supermarket that had to remove packets of nuts from their shelves, because they didn't warn people that the packet contained nuts.)

British soldier, Private John Henry Parr (19 July 1897 – 21 August 1914), is believed to be the first soldier of the Commonwealth killed by enemy action in the First World War. (He is buried in the St Symphorien military cemetery, just southeast of Mons, in France, but his age on the gravestone is given as 20, because the army id not know his true age: 17.)

According to a survey conducted by the AA, 63% of British drivers have used a map in the past six months. (About a third (35%) of drivers in the UK said they use both sat navs, and an atlas as a back-up to plan a route - with just one in six (17%) relying solely on their sat nav. Unsurprisingly, younger drivers, aged 18 to 24, prefer to use just a sat nav. Of course, a sat nav is still a map, really.)

The word punch, used to describe the traditional drink, originated from the Hindustani word panch which means 5. (The recipe for punch was originally imported from India to England in the 17th century.  It is a cocktail that has to have 5 key ingredients: alcohol (often rum), lemon, sugar, water, and tea or spices.)