Schitt’s the real deal!
QUESTION Where is the motel that features in Canadian TV comedy Schitt’s Creek?
The cult Netflix comedy Schitt’s Creek follows the exploits of a wealthy family who have fallen on hard times.
The Inland Revenue has seized everything, except the eponymous middle-ofnowhere town that Johnny Rose bought as a joke for his son, David, years before.
The family move into the Rosebud Motel. The real building is the hockley Motel in Mono, Ontario, 50 miles northwest of Toronto. With 6.7 acres along the banks of the Nottawasaga River, it is on the market for £1.2 million.
Much of the show was filmed 50 miles east of the motel in the town of Goodwood. It’s a major attraction for the show’s fans, who pose in front of the buildings used for Rose Apothecary, Bob’s garage and Cafe Tropical.
Rose Apothecary is really a wool and craft shop called Romni Goodwood; Bob’s garage is a blue wooden workshop owned by local resident Joe Toby; and Cafe Tropical is a privately owned home.
Amy Sturridge, Torquay, Devon.
QUESTION Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong refers to soldiers receiving cake from home. What sort of cake was it and how did it get to the trenches?
AS WeLL as envelopes marked with a lipstick kiss and perfume-scented photos, wives and girlfriends would send trench cake to the front line.
This not only raised the spirits of the soldiers, but also gave them a break from an unrelenting diet of bully beef, bread and biscuits.
To get to France in one piece, the cake had to be robust and be able to retain moisture. A good solid fruit cake would be ideal. After all, the tradition that the top tier of a wedding cake is reserved to be served at the christening of the couple’s first child is down to the fact it is still good to eat after a couple of years.
Though rationing wasn’t introduced until the end of the war in 1918, some cake ingredients were hard to come by.
There are no eggs in the official trench cake recipe and vinegar was used to react with baking soda to help the cake rise.
Ingredients: 4oz margarine, ½lb flour, 3 oz brown sugar, 3 oz currants, 2 tsp cocoa, ½ tsp nutmeg, ½ tsp ginger, grated lemon rind, ½ tsp baking soda, 1 tsp vinegar, ¼ pint of milk.
Method: Grease cake tin. Rub margarine into flour in a basin. Add dry ingredients (except baking soda). Mix well.
Dissolve baking soda in vinegar and milk. Beat well into cake mixture. Pour into tin. Bake in a moderate oven for two hours. Dispatch to loved one.
Sally Brookshaw, Sileby, Leics.
DuRING World War I, billions of postal items were delivered to soldiers, many on the front line — a remarkable operation.
Since Rowland hill revolutionised the postal service with the Penny Post in 1840, the ability to communicate reliably and cheaply was a public expectation.
According to the British Postal Museum & Archive, by 1914 the Post Office employed more than 250,000 people, making it the biggest economic enterprise in Britain and the largest single employer in the world.
The Army recognised receiving frontline post was essential to soldiers’ morale, so at the outbreak of World War I, a huge logistical operation was launched.
The postal services personnel for the expeditionary Force were recruited from the Royal engineers Postal Section (RePS). This was a part-time reserve unit of GPO men with military training.
The RePS sorting office in London’s Regent’s Park covered five acres and was thought to be the largest wooden building in the world.
Called the home Depot, it employed 2,500 sorters, mainly women. Outward mail was sorted by military unit. each morning foremen would be informed by Whitehall of the latest movements of regiments or ships so mail could be dispatched to the correct location.
A fleet of Army lorries would take the mail to Folkestone or Southampton where ships would shuttle it across to Army Postal Service depots in Le havre, Boulogne and Calais.
Trains ran under cover of darkness, dropping off mail along the route and unloading the rest at railheads where lorries took letters and packages to refilling points for divisional supplies.
Regimental post orderlies would sort the mail at the roadside and carts would be wheeled to the front line to deliver letters to individual soldiers.
The aim was to hand out letters from home with the evening meal. Return mail was collected from field post offices.
More than 12million letters and one million parcels a week were delivered.
James Whitehead, Durham.
QUESTION Where is the quietest place in the world?
FuRTheR to the earlier answer, Microsoft’s anechoic chamber may be the quietest artificial environment on earth, but during a visit to the Waitomo glowworm caves in New Zealand, I was taken into a chamber where the lights were turned off, leaving me in complete darkness and total silence.
The experience became disconcerting within just a few seconds. The only sound I could hear was my own pulse through my ears, accompanied by hallucinations in the absolute blackness.
As an electronics engineer, I have been in several anechoic chambers, but this cave was far more disturbing.
Henry Farad, Luton, Beds.
The quietest place in the world I have experienced is Plugge’s Plateau on the Gallipoli Peninsula above Anzac Cove.
I visited in 2000 and walked the 750m steep path from Shrapnel Valley Cemetery to where Lt Col Arthur Plugge, CMG, set up his hQ in April 1915.
It is now the location of the smallest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery on the Peninsula, with just 21 graves, including four unknown soldiers.
I stood at the top overlooking the cove below and slowly realised something was missing. There was no wind rustling trees, no birds singing or distant traffic. I experienced total silence.