Some interesting news for Harry Potter fans. The Daily Mirror tells us that the building used as Harry's wizarding school is up for sale.
The dining hall at Royal Connaught Park in Hertfordshire appeared in the first three films, and the property has also been seen in other films.
It was converted into luxury accommodation and now, 28 apartments and detached homes have been put up for sale with prices starting from £649,000 to £2.8million.
Some people do have the strangest hobbies. Take 75 year old Stanley Hardwick for instance. The Daily Express reveals that he has a 500 strong collection of lawnmowers.
Apparently he gathered them over nearly 30 years, beginning when he worked on the Filey Golf links course in North Yorkshire and was instructed to upgrade the club's equipment.
Stanley said: “I started collecting when I saw a lot of old lawnmowers just going to scrap.
I thought I would save a few and it escalated from there.
“Now I've got over 500. I never planned to have this many - it just sort of snowballed.”
Returning to base – after over half a century – is a toy panda which was taken by an RAF pilot as his mascot during the Dambuster raids on Germany's Ruhr dams in the Second World War.
The Daily Express reports that William Gordon Radcliffe tucked the bear into his flying boots on more than 60 missions and after the end of the war the panda was passed on to his daughter Dorothy Bailey who took it to RAF Coningsby for an Antiques Roadshow event where it was examined by military expert Mark Smith.
He commented: “This panda is priceless. He was priceless to your dad, he is priceless to you, he is priceless to the RAF as a member of the Dams crew.”
What a wasteful lot we are, according to an article in The Guardian. They say a survey commissioned by Love Food Hate Waste, showed that nearly one in five UK households admits to binning an entire loaf of bread before even opening or slicing it.
Emma Marsh, head of the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, run by the government’s waste advisory body Wrap , said: “Bread is a favourite on our plates, and in our lunch boxes, but sometimes if we don’t finish a loaf, it goes stale and ends up in the bin. There are simple things we can do to use it up or store it differently, to reduce food waste and save money.”
A study by the University of Glasgow has revealed that Scotland has more than 400 words and expressions for snow.
A BBC article reports that 421 terms have been logged including snaw (snow), sneesl (to begin to rain or snow) and skelf (a large snowflake).
Other Scottish words relating to snow include feefle - to swirl; flindrikin - a slight snow shower; snaw-pouther - fine driving snow; spitters - small drops or flakes of wind-driven rain or snow and unbrak - the beginning of a thaw
Dr Susan Rennie, lecturer in English and Scots language at the university, said: “Weather has been a vital part of people's lives in Scotland for centuries. The number and variety of words in the language show how important it was for our ancestors to communicate about the weather, which could so easily affect their livelihoods.”
Reference list:
The Express (www.express.co.uk)
Daily Mirror (www.mirror.co.uk)
BBC (www.bbc.co.uk)
The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk)