10 Things I Didn't Know This Time Last Week
10 Things I Didn't Know This Time Last Week
1 . Saddam Hussein's son Uday kept nine lions as the centrepiece of a bizarre menagerie of exotic animals. This week the lions were moved to Baghadad zoo.
2. Britons throw away enough rubbish every hour to fill the Royal Albert Hall.
3. The 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade, immortalised in a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson as a catastrophic British military blunder, was nothing of the sort. Some 60% of men who took part returned "without a scratch" and judged it a success, says Terry Brighton, author of a book about the battle.
4. Thirty-eight million polo sweets are produced every day and more than 140 are consumed every second.
5. MPs, MEPs and members of the House of Lords get free parking at Heathrow, Gatwick, Glasgow and Edinburgh airports and three others. BAA shareholders want to bring this to an end.
6. Word of the Week: sea-burbs - the mushrooming coastal communities on the east coast of Australia, populated by a wealthy middle-aged diaspora of folk escaping Sydney and Melbourne.
7. Plans to raise the retirement age to 70 are nothing new. Lloyd George set the retirement bar at 70 when he introduced the first state pension in the budget of 1908. It was reduced to 65 after World War I.
8. Instead of cards, the first British cash machines, introduced by Barclays in 1967, were operated with rectangular tokens bought by customers.
9. The chairman of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association, Matthew O'Callaghan, is a vegetarian.
10. The bookmakers William Hill loses 80,000 little pens a day - the sort used to fill out betting slips.
1 . Saddam Hussein's son Uday kept nine lions as the centrepiece of a bizarre menagerie of exotic animals. This week the lions were moved to Baghadad zoo.
2. Britons throw away enough rubbish every hour to fill the Royal Albert Hall.
3. The 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade, immortalised in a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson as a catastrophic British military blunder, was nothing of the sort. Some 60% of men who took part returned "without a scratch" and judged it a success, says Terry Brighton, author of a book about the battle.
4. Thirty-eight million polo sweets are produced every day and more than 140 are consumed every second.
5. MPs, MEPs and members of the House of Lords get free parking at Heathrow, Gatwick, Glasgow and Edinburgh airports and three others. BAA shareholders want to bring this to an end.
6. Word of the Week: sea-burbs - the mushrooming coastal communities on the east coast of Australia, populated by a wealthy middle-aged diaspora of folk escaping Sydney and Melbourne.
7. Plans to raise the retirement age to 70 are nothing new. Lloyd George set the retirement bar at 70 when he introduced the first state pension in the budget of 1908. It was reduced to 65 after World War I.
8. Instead of cards, the first British cash machines, introduced by Barclays in 1967, were operated with rectangular tokens bought by customers.
9. The chairman of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association, Matthew O'Callaghan, is a vegetarian.
10. The bookmakers William Hill loses 80,000 little pens a day - the sort used to fill out betting slips.