According to the TUC (Trades Union Congress) 5.3 million people in the UK work an average of 7.7 hours of overtime a week. (Chief executives topped a list of those doing the most unpaid overtime, at an average of 13.2 hours a week, followed by teaching staff (12.1 hours), finance managers (11.3 hours) and managers […]

On World Book Day I thought I would share some scary facts about the land of Shakespeare and Dickens. According to the OECD, young people in England have the lowest literacy levels in the developed world. (One term used is "functionally literate", and around 16 per cent, or 5.1 million adults in England, can be […]

Pizza is thought to have been created over 1,000 years ago in Italy. (Of course it's now a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, the pizza effect is a term used to describe how elements of a nation or people's culture can be transformed or at least more fully embraced elsewhere, then re-imported back to their culture […]

According to research presented at the Sociolinguistics Symposium, children start swearing at a much earlier age than they did a few decades ago. (Seemingly in the UK kids start swearing at the age of 4! In the 1980s most children didn't start to swear until they were 13.  (I don't think I swore until I […]

Diesel drivers in the UK are facing a congestion charge in 16 UK cities from 2020. Maarten van den Heuvel - twitter.com/mvdheuvel (Dubbed the "T tax" (here T stands for toxic), the first cities to receive approval are Birmingham,  Derby, Leeds, Nottingham, London, and Southampton. Cities that are considering clean air zones are Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Hull, […]

According to research conducted by Nationwide, office workers in the UK spend an average of £40,000 during their careers on treats, traditions, whip rounds and equipment associated with the job. (All those tea jars, after work drinks, leaving presents, highlighters etc. add up. In fact tea and coffee clubs alone cost £66.36 a year.)