Little drops rain from the heavens

QUESTION What is manna? WHEN Israel came into the wilderness of Sinai, the Lord provided them with ‘bread from heaven’ (Exodus 16:4).

It is described as ‘a small, round thing,’ like the ‘hoarfrost on the ground’ and ‘like coriander seed’, tasting ‘like wafers made with honey’ (Exodus 16:23-31).

Some Christians believe manna was a supernatural food sent by God.

For the sceptics, there are two theories.

From the late 19th century, Arabs of the Sinai peninsula sold a sweet ‘resin’ from the tamarisk tree as man es-simma – heavenly manna.

The second theory is that manna was honeydew, the sugar-rich sticky liquid secreted by aphids and some scale insects as they fed on plant sap. The Tamarisk manna scale

(Trabutina mannipara), an insect that feeds on this tree, is seen as a potential candidate for manna.

Andrew Trust, Newcastle upon Tyne.

QUESTION Did Blue Peter’s John Noakes hold a number of skydiving records? FURTHER to the earlier answer, it was wonderful to hear the story of John Noakes’s five-mile-high skydiving record.

John was a shy man who dubbed his daredevil alter-ego ‘the idiot John Noakes’.

Other great acts of madness include his wipe-out on the Cresta Run in a two-man bobsleigh.

There was also the time he was strapped to a Tiger Moth wing holding a pole with a pin on one end to pop balloons during a flypast.

For me, his most memorable appearance was in 1987 when he choked back tears as he told television viewers that his beloved Shep, the Blue Peter children’s programme’s dog, had died. The border collie was 16.