Interesting Facts

This year the UK has a bumper crop of Brussels sprouts. (An unseasonably warm autumn (we are on track for it to be the warmest year ever since records began in 1910), and a (so far) mild winter means that they are not only bigger, and earlier, but there are plenty of them too. Despite their bad reputation for causing flatulence, the UK eats around 434 million Brussels just in December.  They are the Christmas staple veg. Added to that, Marks and Spencer have released a Brussels Sprout smoothie as part of their Christmas food range. Yummy!) !Note - I checked in my dictionary, it is definitely meant to be spelt Brussels sprout, not brussel sprout.

According to a report by traffic information firm Inrix, the average driver in the UK spends 30 hours stuck in traffic jams, every year. (That rises to almost 82 hours in London, which is the second most congested major city in Europe after Brussels. I'm so grateful that I don't have to commute any more, just get up and roll downstairs every morning. There's never a traffic jam, but I sometimes have to fight my way past Laika to turn the computer on.)

There are 12 net contributors and 15 net recipients within the EU. (Net contributors receive less money from EU funds than they pay into the joint coffers.  Net recipients receive more grants and benefits than they pay.  The largest net contributors include Germany (at 9 billion euros), France (6.4 billion), Italy (5.9 billion), Great Britain (5.6 billion) and the Netherlands (2.2 billion).  The leading net recipients are Poland (11 billion), Greece (4.6 billion), Hungary (4.4 billion), Spain (2.9 billion), and Portugal (2.9 billion).  Calculating that for each individual EU citizen, however, the picture looks different: Danes pay the most into EU coffers at 150 euros each, while Hungary receives the biggest payout - 442 euros per capita in aid money from Brussels.)