The Saturday briefing
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
Is there anything you’re yearning to know? Send your questions, on any subject, to the contacts given below, and we will do our best to answer them...
QIn 1957 I visited the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and remember seeing a brass marker plate in the grounds showing the line of the Prime Meridian. I read an article stating it was installed in 1960. Is my memory correct? Alan Rayner, Howden, East Yorkshire
AThe Royal Museums Greenwich team could not find an exact date for the Meridian marker, where East meets West, that is there today. The earliest photo is from 1960.
The Observatory became a museum in 1953 but Flamsteed House, the original Observatory building designed by Christopher Wren, didn’t open to the public until 1960, so they doubt it would have been before then. They did find a photo from 1931 featuring tourists beside a Meridian marker just outside the building, so this may be the one you recall.
The Royal Observatory was founded in 1675 by King Charles II to reduce shipwrecks by studying the sky. Before then, sailors could work out their latitude – north- south position – by observing the sun or stars, but not their longitude – east- west position. It led to captains carrying clocks keeping Greenwich time and consulting maps and the sky accordingly.
In 1884, a conference in Washington set up a world time system and it needed to be based on a prime meridian line, running from North to South. Greenwich was chosen, to France’s horror, as Paris had been in the running. Every place on the Earth has been measured in terms of its angle from this line. In Britain, it starts 15 miles east of Hull and departs 10 miles east of Brighton.
QI recently had my second Covid vaccination, which is great, and I said to my friends: “Now the world is my oyster”. Why do we say this? Ruth Whittle, Crosby, Liverpool
ALike so many of our colourful phrases, it was coined by William Shakespeare. It featured in his comedy, The Merry Wives Of Windsor, written at the tail end of the 16th century. Falstaff, the trickster who is trying to woo rich married women, tells his associate Pistol: “I will not lend thee a penny.” Pistol replies: “Why then the world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open.”
This is thought to mean Pistol would use violent means, or his skills, to seek his fortune, because Falstaff refuses to help. It has lost its violent connotations to become a metaphor for life, with the world holding endless possibilities if you try hard, as to find a pearl, you need to open a lot of oysters.
The play also gave us “laughing stock”, common in Shakespeare’s day, with people placed in stocks in town squares as punishment and subject to public humiliation.
We can also thank the Bard for “you’ve got to be cruel to be kind”, from Hamlet, “wild- goose chase”, from Romeo And Juliet, “Love is blind”, from The Merchant Of Venice, and “Eaten me out of house and home”, from Henry IV Part 2. Shakespeare also contributed to the rise of the knock- knock joke, with his “knock, knock” scene in Macbeth – although it was not for laughs.
QIf the country goes vegan, what would happen to our woodlands, as more land would be needed for agriculture?
Phyllis Fode, Christchurch, Dorset
AFarmland covers about two thirds of the UK, with more than 20 million hectares of land, roughly the size of 30 million football pitches. A quarter of it is used to grow crops, mostly for feeding livestock. According to a study in The American Journal of
Clinical Nutrition. a meat- eater’s diet actually needs 17 times more land than a vegetarian’s.
Farmers could also turn to agroforestry to meet demand, which sees the same land turned over for both forests and crops. A Harvard University study found the UK would be able to sustain itself by returning a percentage of land used for animal agriculture back to forest. Beans, pulses, fruit and vegetables could be grown instead of animal feed.
Vertical farming could also help cater for plant- based diets, with plant factories that are vertically stacked growing environments, so do not require extra farmland.
More than half a million Brits follow a plant- based diet. Massive changes to our land are predicted, but the main driver is likely to be climate change, not veganism.
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