Check in for motel mirth
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.
Having failed to pay their taxes, the family lose everything, except the eponymous middle-ofnowhere town that Johnny Rose had previously bought as a joke for his son, David.
The family move into a local motel. The real building is the Hockley Motel in Mono, Ontario, 50 miles north-west of Toronto.
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 town’s many landmark businesses and buildings.
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 perfumescented photos, wives and girlfriends would send Trench cake to the frontline.
This not only raised the spirits of the soldiers, but also gave them a break from an unrelenting diet of bully beef, bread and biscuit.
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 that it remains edible for a long period.
Though rationing wasn’t introduced until near 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.
The ingredients are as follows: 4 oz margarine, ½ lb flour, 3 oz brown sugar, 3oz currants, 2tsp cocoa, ½ tsp nutmeg, ½ tsp ginger, grated lemon rind, ½tsp baking soda, 1tsp 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 frontline — a remarkable operation.
Since Rowland Hill revolutionised Britain’s 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 British 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 it was thought to be the largest wooden building that existed 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 that mail could be then 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 frontline 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 along with one million parcels a week were delivered.
James Whitehead, Durham.
QUESTION How did Strata Florida Abbey in West Wales get its name?
THIS former Cistercian abbey near Pontrhydfendigaid, a remote village in Ceredigion, was founded in 1164. The name Strata Florida is a Latinisation of the Welsh Ystrad Fflur and has a double meaning: Valley of (the river of) flowers.
Ystrad corrupts into Strata while Fflur (flowers) is also the name of the nearby river.
The abbey was second only to St David’s as a place of pilgrimage and linchpin of Welsh culture.
Strata Florida was targeted during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries — which occurred in Ireland, England and Wales — and little remains of what was
O IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Irish Daily Mail, Embassy House, Herbert Park Lane, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. You can also fax them to 0044 1952 510906 or you can email them to charles.legge@dailymail.ie. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence. once clearly a great place of worship. But there is still enough for visitors to feel the presence of a forgotten way of life.
Giles Rees, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion
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 fascinating Waitomo Glowworm Caves in New Zealand, I was taken into a chamber where the lights had been 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 a far more disturbing experience.
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 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.