Interesting Facts

Anyone who was attended the sessions on food waste in Kitely will not be surprised to learn that supermarket giant Tesco has revealed that it generated 59,400 tonnes of food waste in 2015. (To put this into perspective this is the equivalent of nearly 119 million meals. In their defense, they are the only supermarket to publish the figures, and they have pledged to redistribute all edible food waste from stores to charities by the end of 2017.)

The odds of Leicester City winning the Premier League at the start of the 2015/16 football season were 5000:1. This means that gamblers thought the following things were more likely to happen:- 2,500:1 - David Moyes to be an X Factor judge 2,500:1 - Arsenal would sack Arsene Wenger and install Piers Morgan as boss 2,000:1 - Kim Kardashian will become US President by 2020 1,000:1 - Sir Alex Ferguson would win Strictly Come Dancing 1,000:1 - Hugh Hefner would admit he's a virgin 1,000:1 - Robbie Savage will be named the next James Bond 1,000:1 - Bono will become the next Pope 500:1 - Simon Cowell will become the next Prime Minister of the UK 500:1 - Andy Murray would name his first born Novak You might need to look up some of these names to see how unlikely they are, apart from Kim Kardasian: As Trump is a contender, I don't see why this couldn't happen.) Update -  The people of Leicester must be very, very happy today.

According to data from hitched.co.uk, more and more Brits are getting married on a Thursday. (Is this because of tradition, or for religious reasons?  No.  It's because it's cheaper.  Seemingly, tying the knot at weekends can cost thousands of pounds more for the cost of venues, catering and entertainers. Caroline Hendry, editor of hitched.co.uk, said that Thursdays are popular as many venues charge the same high prices on a Friday as they do on the weekend. She added: ‘With many venues and wedding suppliers booking up months or even years in advance, a Thursday wedding can also give couples a better chance of booking their first choice vendors.’ At a time when everyone is struggling with debts and rising house prices, around 21,700 couples chose to marry on a Thursday in 2015 – about 6,000 more than in 2008. According to figures compiled by the Daily Mail, the Achnagairn Estate in the Highlands, where castle hire, including use of the ballroom and a two-night...

National Offer Day (around the beginning of March) is when parents across England are told by their Local Authority whether their children will be offered a place in their first choice secondary school. (It is a fraught time for parents with children who are in their final year of primary school. In 2015 84.2% of children were offered a place at their first choice school, but that means quite a few missed out. Increasingly parents whose kids don't get their first choice are spending thousands of pounds to try and secure a place in their chosen school, in what is becoming an increasingly competitive environment.) Source

The UK government paid social media giant Facebook 113 times more in taxpayers’ money for advertising than Facebook paid in corporation tax in the UK. (Government departments spent £489,329 in the 2014-15 fiscal year for advertising on Facebook, who only coughed up £4,327 in corporation tax. They only had to pay such a tiny amount because they recorded a £28.5million loss in the UK, but at the same time they handed staff £35million in share bonuses. Increasingly it seems that the job of governments is to be cleverer than corporations, but I want to know the answer to one question, "What on earth were they advertising?")

People in the UK are eating 3.5 million ready meals - wait for it - a day. (According to analysts Kantar Worldpanel for trade mag The Grocer, Brits munched their way through £3.2 billion worth of chilled or frozen dinners in 2015. Family favourites are shepherd's pie, lasagne and chicken tikka masala, with traditional British meals accounting for £1.3 billion of sales. Italian meals £610 million, Indian nearly £400 million and Chinese meals £281 million. We are turning into a nation of microwave chefs.)

According to a report from the Department of Transport, the slowest road in England is the A306 Northbound at Richmond, which has a rush hour speed of just 3.5 mph. (We are slowing down: In the year ending to December 2015, average speeds on local ‘A’ roads in England during the weekday morning peak were a measly 23.4 mph. The actual speed limit on a dual carriageway can vary from 40mph and 70mph, but you'll be lucky to get the chance.  One theory is that roads are getting congested by all the online shopping deliveries. Outside of London Nottingham is home to the slowest road: The A6005 Eastbound with rush hour speeds of just 6.4 mph.  This shouldn't come as a surprise to Amatsu.)

The number of coffee shops in the UK surpassed 20,000 in 2015, boosting sales by 10pc to £7.9bn.  (Unfortunately this soaring demand means there will be a problem; supply won't be able to keep up, and market experts are predicting a shortage of coffee within the next 3 years.  Strangely the price paid to producers means they aren't likely to want to increase productivity, as according to Mintec, the price of Arabica coffee has fallen by 35pc over the last year. If I run out of coffee, there will be no more sessions.)

According to "The Grocer", Brits are shunning sliced white bread in favour of freshly baked loaves and healthier wholegrain alternatives. (In 2015 Britain's biggest bakers, Warburtons, Hovis and Kingsmill, lost £121 million in revenue, and a large 750g or 800g loaf costs 13.3per cent less than it did a year ago. There's a saying in English, "The best thing since sliced bread", this may be irrelevant now.)

According to the Indian Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, smartphone sales in India reached 100 million by the end of December, 2015. (India is growing at a phenomenal pace and the government is looking to expand rural development with broadband being laid out in rural India. According to data from analyst firm CyberMedia Research (CMR) 94% of feature-phones (as opposed to smartphones) sold in India were priced below 2,000 rupees  £21.)

The word of the year for 2015, as chosen by the Oxford English dictionary, is a pictograph: (Officially called the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji, (I call it laugh till you cry) was chosen as the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015. I wonder what Shakespeare would say.  Answers on the back of a postcard using 10 emojis or less.)

At least £122 billion worth of property in England and Wales is owned by companies registered offshore. (The problem is that some of the world's most notorious criminals are buying Britain's luxury homes to launder crooked cash, and at the same time pushing up the price of property. Especially in the area of London. It all came to light in July 2015, when it emerged that the ownership of 221b Baker Street, home to the fictional super-sleuth Sherlock Holmes, was linked to a brutal former secret police chief accused of murder and money-laundering. What would Mrs Hudson say?) British Houses Source

nder plans set out by Schools Minister Nick Gibb, every state school pupil will be expected to sit at least five “hard” GCSEs to increase the number of state-educated students at the best universities and in the top professions, the government has said. (This means that all pupils starting secondary school in autumn 2015 will be expected to take maths, English, a foreign language, history or geography and at least one science subject when they begin their GCSE courses in 2018. If you have just sat your art and design, music and drama, business studies, communication and culture and citizenship exams, you can breathe a sigh of relief.)

Before you shoot me down in flames and say that < 3  is not a word, read this:- The heart emoji "< 3" has been chosen as the word of the year in the 15th annual survey of the English language by the Global Language Monitor. (If  you are new to these emoji or emoticons, each emoji represents an emotion, expression, state of mind, person, place, or thing.  There are now some 722 characters, with another 250 being made available in 2016, and 37 more due for approval in June 2015. Social media and the internet is driving the emoji language forward, with symbols like hashtag #, photobomb - gatecrashing a selfie, bae - a term of endearment for one’s object of desire, “bash” tag - using a hashtag to undermine your frenemies and clickbait - a link you just have to click on - all making it into the top 10 words. On a sad note, the world’s top phrase was “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” chanted by demonstrators against the police shooting of an unarmed black man in Fergus...

7.5 million UK citizens who are eligible to vote are not yet registered for this year's (2015) General Election. (Changes to the voting system mean that many people are no longer on the electoral roll. This means that when they troll up to the polling station on May 7th, they will be turned away. They have till midnight tonight to get their skates on. It has to be said though; in the last General Election in 2010, out of 47 million voters, only 29.6 million bothered. Democracy in action? More like "Democracy inaction".)

Since 2012 all large shops and supermarkets in England had to hide tobacco products from public view, and now all shops will have to do so from 6th April. (The original ban only applied to shops of more than 280 sq m (3,014 sq ft), and small outlets were exempt until 2015, but that is about to end as the ban comes into force across the UK.  The ban will stop cigarettes being visible at the point of sale in any small shops and other premises selling tobacco such as cafes, pubs and clubs. It seems to be working too, with smoking rates for England at their lowest ever levels: the latest figures show only 8% of 15 year olds are now regular smokers, compared with 22% in 2003. Interestingly on a recent trip to France, every other shop seemed to sell e-cigarettes.)

23rd January 2015 Today is the day you are most likely to break your New Year's resolution. Your cravings will reach a peak as you begin to believe that January will never end, but hang on in there, and remember why you made that resolution!

A.K. Verma, an Indian civil servant, joined the state-run Central Public Works Department (CPWD) as an assistant executive engineer in 1980:  A public sector job in India is usually seen as a job for life. (Why does that make him interesting? Well, 10 years later, he went on leave, and never went back to work. People leave work all the time, so it's still not that interesting, but he managed to bunk off work for 24 years, his job was only terminated in 2015. Unfortunately for him, his pay was stopped in the 1990s. I wonder what he is doing now.)

2015 will be one second longer than a normal year. (The Paris Observatory, in France has said that 30 June 2015 will be one second longer, as what is called a "leap second" is added to the day to account for discrepancies between Earth time and atomic time, due to the slowing rotation of the Earth. This will be the 26th leap second to be added since 1972, and the extra second will be added at 11:59:60pm UTC on 30 June, bringing the total number of seconds for 2015 up to 31,536,001. What will you do with your extra second?)

The French city of Grenoble is going to ban all advertising hoardings by next year. (They will scrap 326 advertising hoardings, including 64 large billboards by April 2015. The mayor has promised to replace the signs and billboards with trees and community noticeboards. They will be the first city in Europe to do so, although the French village, Forcalquier, implemented a similar ban back in 2009.)