According to the British Coffee Association around 2,000,000,000 cups of coffee are consumed worldwide every day. (According to market researchers, Mintel, in the UK we drink over 70 million cups a day, but 3/4 (74%) of all UK adults drink instant coffee, compared to around 1/2 (48%) who drink fresh coffee. I stopped drinking instant […]

New guidelines for school pupils in England state that only phrases starting with "what" or "how" merit an exclamation mark! (This means that children who use punctuation marks in written tests will be penalised unless they adhere to strict rules. I mean, I know I ask people not to use them in every sentence, and […]

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 […]

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 […]

Edwin Beard Budding, an engineer from Stroud, England, is credited with inventing the lawnmower. (It was a push mower, inspired by a machine he saw in a local cloth mill which used a cutting cylinder (or bladed reel) mounted on a bench to trim give wollen cloth a smooth finish. The mower was designed primarily […]

Most people phone their local council about bin collections, potholes and housing - but it appears many also think they have the answer to every question under the sun. The Local Government Association (LGA), which deals with about 50 million calls across England and Wales every year has released some of the calls that have […]