5 THINGS WE LEARNED THIS WEEK

Of daily online newsletter

1 Wind power was Britain’s biggest source of electricity over the past 12 months – the first time a renewable energy source has overtaken gas. Wind turbines generated 32 per cent of our electricity compared to 31 per cent from gas power, which had previously been at number one for 28 consecutive years. The surge was aided by powerful storms in December and January, as well as huge offshore wind farms in Scotland and the North Sea coming online.

2 Britons spent almost 800 years on hold on calls to HMRC in the 2022-23 tax year. A report found that the total number of hours people had to wait to be answered on the taxman’s helpline was seven million hours, more than double the 3.2million hours in 2019-20.

3 Amazon has turned Americans off the name Alexa. There was initially a spike in girls given the name after the online giant released its cloud-based voice service in 2014, but the number of Alexas has plummeted from a peak of more than 6,000 in 2015 to just 490 last year.

4 Duckface, the character played by Anna Chancellor, above, in Four Weddings And A Funeral, was originally called F***face. However, film-makers were worried that the movie – which begins with Hugh Grant saying, ‘F***, f***, f***, f***, f***ity f***, bugger’ – contained too much swearing, so they changed the name.

5 Farmers have created the world’s first pigs’ milk ice cream. It was whipped up by Dutch farmer Erik Stegink using a process in which sows are hand-milked. Called ‘pork ice cream’, it’s creamier because pigs’ milk has 8.5 per cent fat compared to 3.5 per cent in cows.

Sign up for free to The Knowledge, a five-minute daily newsletter that makes news more manageable at