BRITAIN'S Flying Scotsman train has been voted the best-known locomotive in the world.

The Daily Mirror reports that, in a survey commissioned by the National Railway Museum and carried out across four continents, people were asked to name five trains or engines they had heard of.

STAFF at a residential home for the elderly have got themselves into a right pickle...over a parrot.

The Daily Express reports that an African Grey called Rebel has learned how to mimic the alarms used by the residents to summon help.

The bird belongs to one of the residents, Roy Hagley, at Brooke House in Brooke, near Norwich.

Apparently there have already been a string of false alarms at the 35-resident home.

BRITAIN is a nation of animal lovers. So much so, says the Daily Mirror, that the electricity used to keep pets entertained is enough to light 56,000 homes for a full year.

Philip Sellwood, chief executive of the Energy Saving Trust, said: “We do understand Brits love their pets so we're not about to start asking people to switch things off.

IT'S a sign of the times – a survey, reported in the Daily Express, claims that payments from the Tooth Fairy have shot up to as much as £10 a tooth as children feel the benefits of the economic up-turn.

Instead of the traditional coin under the pillow for a young child who loses a baby tooth, some parents are now leaving £5 or £10 notes and the average payment from the Tooth Fairy is £2.10 per tooth - up from £1.50 five years ago.

News Round Up

by Patrick O'Connor

IT'S one of the best known children's stories and now the only photograph of the toy bear which inspired AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh has been discovered in a family archive.

The Daily Mail says that the photograph, taken around 1913, shows the two young children of the illustrator hired by author Milne to create the fictional bear, standing next to one of their teddy bears called Growler, which was the inspiration for the initial drawings of Winnie the Pooh.

News Round Up

by Patrick O'Connor

THERE are some people (my wife among them) who claim that football is extremely boring and the Daily Express tells us of one supporter who had to be rescued by firefighters after he fell asleep on the toilet during a match - and only woke up seven hours later.

The man was watching the League 1 fixture between Barnsley and Fleetwood at Barnsley's Oakwell Stadium when he popped to the toilet at half time.