Bringing a little colour to your life each day - with six things that delight, inform and entertain.
Before the advent of intensive farming and the use of herbicides, the brilliant scarlet poppy was a common sight growing amongst Britain's corn fields. Its tissue paper bright red flowers were a striking contrast to the golden corn in high summer. In the twentieth century, it became a symbol of bloodshed on the World War One battlefields.
The Long Mynd is a heath and moorland upland plateau that provides dramatic views in the Shropshire Hills, near the town of Church Stretton. It is approximately 7 miles long by 3 miles wide, and is broadly defined by steep valleys on its eastern side, and a long slope to the western side that rises in a steep escarpment.
Sir Richard Owen was an English biologist, anatomist and palaeontologist, whose efforts helped to establish London's Natural History Museum as the well-loved public institution it is today. Despite his genius, he was thoroughly disliked by many - described by Charles Darwin as "spiteful, extremely malignant," and by the president of the Geological Society as suffering from "lamentable coldness of the heart".
Lindow Man, also known as Pete Marsh, is the preserved 2000-year-old body of a man discovered in a peat bog at Lindow Moss near Wilmslow in Cheshire. The remains, estimated to have been deposited between 2 BC and 119 AD, were found in 1984 by commercial peat cutters.
The fictional character of Mary Poppins, invented by P.L. Travers, typifies the quintessential British nanny. Though much has changed since the books were written the British Nanny most definitely did and does exist. Indeed she - and quite often these days he, seems to be thriving!
The first public film shows in the UK to a paying audience took place in London in 1896. On 21st February that year, the Polytechnic Institute on Upper Regent Street near Oxford Circus hosted a display of the Lumière brothers' new moving-picture device, the Cinématographe.
Six things to delight and entertain you every day.