Stan Bowes, from Diggle, has uncovered some interesting and entertaining facts – you just couldn’t make them up.
LAURA BUXTON released a helium-filled balloon during celebrations for her grandparents’ golden-wedding anniversary in Staffordshire in June 2001.
Attached to the balloon was her name and address and a note asking the finder to write back.
Ten days later she received a reply. The balloon had been found by another Laura Buxton in the garden hedge of her home in Wiltshire, 140 miles away.
Both Lauras were aged 10 years, and both had three-year-old black Labradors, a guinea pig, and a rabbit.
Regarding the above coincidences, many years ago I ran a balloon-race for the Air Training Corps, at Saddleworth Show.
Of the hundreds of balloons launched, three were found in Sweden within a ten-mile diameter circle, one landing in a small boat on a lake. The area was 750 miles from Saddleworth.
But they were not the furthest. Two were found a little west of Moscow!
Improve your vocabulary
Hingle: A snare, made from a bent twig or loop of wire, used by poachers to catch hare or rabbits. They were first outlawed by King Henry VIII, because they were being used in Norfolk to trap swans which, by statute, belong to the Monarch.
Apophthegms
Why is abbreviated such a long word?
Marriages are made in heaven: so are thunder and lightning.
Don’t marry a person that you know that you can live with: only marry someone that you cannot live without.
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