Island of the white roofs
QUESTION Why do all houses in Bermuda have white-stepped roofs?
ALL water used in private houses in Bermuda is rain water collected from the roof and stored in a tank beneath the house. The roofs of the houses are kept well maintained and painted white to ensure the water collected is as clean as possible.
Bermuda is a tiny island, little more than 20 miles long by one mile wide. It sits on top of an extinct, isolated submarine volcano in the Atlantic Ocean 600 miles offshore from Cape Hatteras in the U.S.
The land is composed largely of the remains of a coral reef and rises to no more than a couple of hundred feet above sea level. There are no rivers on the island and any standing water tends to be brackish.
My aunt lived and worked in Bermuda during the Seventies and I was lucky enough to visit for a month while I was a university student. It was fascinating to experience a very different way of life, not least in discovering that tap water had to be boiled before drinking.
While there is little atmospheric pollution so far out in the Atlantic, plenty of birds land on the roofs.
During my visit, I noticed that many hotels had concreted over nearby hillsides and painted them white in order to collect larger volumes of water.
Nowadays, desalination — removing the salt from sea water — means hotels can have large quantities of clean, fresh water.
For householders, if there is not enough rain to keep your private tank topped up, the government will send a water tanker — at a price!
Margaret Graley, Southport, Merseyside.
QUESTION Is it true that Jupiter is so large that, technically, it does not revolve around the Sun?
THe expression that a planet revolves around the Sun is a figure of speech. In reality, two celestial bodies revolve around a common centre, known as the barycentre. In effect, they revolve around each other.
There can be a distinction if the barycentre is inside one of the bodies or outside of it. The earth and the Moon revolve around a common centre of mass. The earth’s mass is 80 times that of the Moon and so a calculation shows the barycentre is a point 2,900 miles from the earth’s centre.
That is still inside the earth, so it could be considered the earth wobbles while the Moon goes around it.
Jupiter is very large, but only onethousandth of the mass of the Sun. Calculating the barycentre of these two bodies shows it is displaced from the centre of the Sun by a little more than its radius. This means Jupiter rotates around a point in space close to, but outside, the Sun.
Keith Matthews, Ferndown, Dorset.
QUESTION What happened to Diane Todd, the star of TV’s Six-Five Special?
I reCALL seeing Diane Todd on the Six- Five Special — the BBC’s first rock ’n’ roll show, which, as the name suggests, was broadcast at 6.05pm on Saturdays from 1957.
I was struck by her stunning, clear singing voice, which seemed at odds with the rock ’n’ roll theme of the shows.
Sporting a pony tail, she dressed the part in a hula skirt, white blouse and belt, but her voice was more akin to Julie Andrews than Brenda Lee’s.
This was perhaps unsurprising as Diane received voice tuition from Julie’s vocal coach, Harold Miller. This helped her carve a long international career in stage musicals.
Diane was born in edinburgh on June 4, 1937. Her singing career began at the age of four when she entertained soldiers on leave from the war. She got the musical bug from her father, who played trumpet in the big swing bands of the time. They moved to London when Diane was ten after she got her break by winning TV’s Carroll Levis Discovery talent show.
Her career went into overdrive in 1956 when she landed her debut stage role at the Drury Lane Theatre London in the musical A Girl Called Jo. She repeated the part in the film version later that year.
Diane became a regular on TV, featuring in The Dickie Henderson Show, a Fifties sitcom, and Dixon Of Dock Green in the aptly titled episode rock, rattle And roll.
Her long run on the Six-Five Special led to a record contract with Decca. Most of her records were ePs featuring songs from The Sound Of Music and other musicals, plus hits from Six-Five Special.
In 1959, she found international fame when she appeared in the first New York Broadway production of My Fair Lady as eliza, a role she reprised in London and South Africa.
In 1965, she married the South African diamond heir Douglas Cullinan and had a daughter, Angelique.
The marriage was tempestuous and after Cullinan’s death, she married fellow The Sound Of Music cast member robin Dolton in 1984. It was not a happy union and his death some years later came in the throes of divorce proceedings.
Diane later made the news when she was almost tricked into marriage by a conman.
She sang in most of the great musicals of the era — My Fair Lady, Guys & Dolls, Kiss Me Kate, Daddy Long Legs, Stop The World I Want To Get Off and The Merry Widow — in South African theatres and opera houses.
She returned to Britain in 2007 and died of leukaemia in Kent in 2010.
Danny Darcy, Reading, Berks.