The Second Book of General Ignorance (34 page)

Sweet dreams, it seems.

In 2005 the British Cheese Board organised a study in an attempt to nail the malicious rumour that eating cheese before sleep gives you nightmares. The results were conclusive. More than three-quarters of the 200 volunteers who took part, each of whom ate 20 grams (0.7 ounces) of cheese before retiring, reported undisturbed sleep. They didn’t have nightmares (though most of them found they could remember their dreams).

Interestingly, different varieties of cheese produced different kinds of dream. Cheddar generated dreams about celebrities and Red Leicester summoned childhood memories. People who ate Lancashire dreamed about work, while Cheshire inspired no dreams at all. There also seemed to be a division between the sexes: 85 per cent of women who ate Stilton recalled bizarre dreams involving such things as talking soft toys, vegetarian crocodiles and dinner-party guests being traded for camels.

The overall conclusion was that cheese is a perfectly safe late-night snack. In addition, because it contains high levels of
the serotonin-producing amino acid trytophan, it is likely to reduce stress and so encourage peaceful sleep.

It may come as a surprise to find that the British Cheese Board now lists over 700 varieties of British cheese – almost twice as many as are made in France. Having said that, 55 per cent of the £2.4 billion UK cheese market is cornered by just one variety: cheddar. Plus, the definition of ‘cheese’ has been stretched a bit to include such ‘varieties’ as Lancashire Christmas Pudding and Cheddar with Mint Choc Chips and Cherries.

The ninth most popular variety of cheese in Britain, Cornish Yarg, may sound ancient, but it only dates back to the 1960s when Allan and Jenny Gray started producing it on their farm near Bodmin Moor. ‘Yarg’ is ‘gray’ spelled backwards.

Despite the profusion of new British cheeses, the French still eat twice as much cheese per head as the British, and they sleep well on it, too. No one in France thinks that eating cheese before bed gives you nightmares.

Beer, bread, cheese and pickle. Yes, they really did.

The British movie
The Ploughman’s Lunch
(1983), written by Ian McEwan and directed by Richard Eyre, claimed that ‘the ploughman’s lunch’ was the spurious invention of an advertising man in the 1960s to encourage people to eat in pubs, and this has become common wisdom. It’s since been alleged that the term first appeared in 1970, in
The Cheese
Handbook
by one B. H. Axler. In the preface, Sir Richard Trehane, chairman of the English Country Cheese Council & Milk Marketing Board, wrote: ‘English cheese and beer have for centuries formed a perfect combination enjoyed as the Ploughman’s Lunch.’

Recent research by the BBC TV show
Balderdash & Piffle
found documentary proof that the Cheese Council started using the term ‘ploughman’s lunch’ to publicise cheese in 1960. But there is also evidence that the term ploughman’s (or ploughboy’s) lunch was used in the 1950s. There’s also photographic evidence of ploughmen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sitting in their fields lunching on what certainly looks like bread, cheese and beer.

What seems most likely is that post-war cheese marketers were determined to remind the public of the long-standing practice of eating bread and cheese in pubs, which had been interrupted by rationing in the Second World War.

So, if ad men didn’t invent the lunch, did they invent the phrase? Apparently not: there are anecdotal accounts of the name being used by pubs as early as the 1940s, and there is even a mention in an 1837
Life of Walter Scott
of ‘an extemporised sandwich, that looked like a ploughman’s lunch’.

The cheese men certainly
popularised
the phrase as a marketing device, and perhaps on pub menus as well. In doing so, they helped turn a traditional, local name for bread, cheese, beer and pickles into a kind of non-copyrighted super-brand, universally recognised throughout the British Isles.

In the long term, though, only the cheese has benefited. Cheese sales have continued to grow strongly (up 2.8 per cent year on year in 2010), but Britain’s last pickled-onion processor, Sheffield Foods, recently described the market as ‘flat’. But not as flat as the sales of traditional beer which, despite the efforts of the Campaign for Real Ale, have declined by 40 per cent in the past thirty years.

Iconic though the ploughman’s lunch may be, it hasn’t
saved the institution that most relies on it. Over a hundred traditional British pubs close every month.

It’s not made in Stilton. That would be illegal.

Under European law, Stilton cheese – like Gorgonzola, Camembert and Parmesan – has Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status. This makes it unlawful to sell it unless it’s made in specified areas. In the case of Stilton, this means the counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire or Nottinghamshire.

The village of Stilton, near Peterborough, is now in Cambridgeshire and was historically part of Huntingdonshire. In 1724, Daniel Defoe noted in his
Tour Through the Villages of
England and Wales
that Stilton was ‘famous for cheese’ and modern cheese historians have shown that a hard cream cheese was certainly made in the village – but no one knows what it was like.

In 1743 the landlord of The Bell, a coaching inn on the Great North Road between London and Edinburgh (now the A1), started to serve an interesting blue-veined cheese. Because The Bell was in Stilton, travellers took to calling this popular new item ‘Stilton cheese’. In fact, the publican, Cooper Thornhill, had discovered it on a farm at Wymondham nearly 50 kilometres (about 30 miles) away, near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire.

So today Melton Mowbray, not Stilton, is the official capital of the Stilton industry, and has been since 1996. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until 2009 that the town was granted protection for its most obvious local product: Melton Mowbray pork pies, under the slightly less stringent Protected
Geographical Indication (PGI). In the past, the local pigs that went into the pies were fed on liquid whey, separated out from the milk curd that went into making Stilton. Today, the pork meat in the pie is allowed to come from anywhere in England – but the pies have to be made
in
Melton Mowbray to a particular recipe.

Melton Mowbray pork pies are among thirty-six British regional PDO or PGI products, along with Cornish Clotted Cream, Whitstable Oysters, Jersey Royal Potatoes and twelve other British cheeses apart from Stilton. But not everybody wants one. In 2004 Newcastle Brown Ale became the first product to apply to be
de
-designated by the EU, so that it could move its brewery out of Newcastle across the river to Gateshead. In 2010 it moved out of Tyneside altogether – to the John Smith Brewery in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire. So much for tradition.

One of the British film industry’s earliest hits starred a piece of Stilton.
Cheese Mites
(1903) outraged cheese manufacturers and caused screams of terrified delight among audiences. The film was considered the first-ever science documentary and it had been commissioned by its producer, Charles Urban (1867–1942) for a series of popular educational shows running at the Alhambra Theatre in London that were called ‘The Unseen World’. It featured a scientist inspecting a piece of ripe Stilton under a microscope – only to discover hundreds of mites ‘crawling and creeping about in all directions’ (as the film catalogue put it) ‘looking like great uncanny crabs, bristling with long spiny hairs and legs’.

Whether this had any effect on sales of Stilton is not recorded – but it did lead to a craze for cheap microscopes. These often came with a free packet of mites.

It isn’t, as some people think, a combination of the names of the poet John Milton (1608–74) and the economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). The town was built around a village whose name dates back to the thirteenth century.

The original ‘Milton Keynes’, with its traditional cottages, thatched pub and church, was in the centre of the area designated for development as a new town in 1967. Today it has renamed itself Middleton, after its first mention in the Domesday Book (1067), when it was Mideltone (Old English for ‘middle farmstead’). By the thirteenth century this had be come Mideltone Kaynes, after the village’s feudal masters, the de Cahaignes. Since all Keynes’s are descended from this family, you could say John Maynard Keynes is named after the place, not vice versa. John Milton has no connection with the area at all.

Only two of the twenty-one ‘new towns’ built in England between 1946 and 1970 take their names from people. Peterlee in County Durham was named after the miner’s union leader Peter Lee (1864–1935), and Telford in
Shropshire after the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford (1757–1834). Perhaps because of this, when Milton Keynes was founded, a junior minister joked that the name ‘combined the poetic with the economic’ and an urban myth was born.

The supposedly boring image of Milton Keynes is the butt of many jokes from outsiders, but not from the 235,000 people who live there. The experiment to create a new town on the scale of a city has been a resounding success.

By 1983 34,000 new jobs had been created and 32,000 houses built. At that point, more than 5 per cent of all houses under construction in south-east England were in Milton Keynes. Today the local economy, driven by the rapid expansion of service industries, is one of the strongest in the country and the per capita income is 47 per cent higher than the national average.

Environmentally, the city is one of the greenest in Europe. There are 4,500 acres of parks and woodland containing more than 40 million trees – with a hundred more planted every day. The road grid and roundabout system may confuse visitors but they mean there is almost no congestion for people who live there.

MK (as residents call it) hosted the UK’s first multiplex cinema, the first modern hospital to be built from scratch and Europe’s first purpose-built indoor skydiving centre. It’s also home to Britain’s most popular theatre outside London and the Open University.

There’s nothing dull about MK’s past either. An archaeological survey carried out in advance of building the town uncovered the 150 million-year-old skeleton of an ichthyosaurus, the tusks of a woolly mammoth and Britain’s largest collection of Bronze Age gold jewellery, the Middleton Keynes Hoard.

In other countries all this might be a cause for celebration, but not in England.

As Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman put it in their novel
Good Omens
(1990): ‘Milton Keynes was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.’

It’s the glass one. Steel balls are the next bounciest and rubber balls come last.

When a ball hits the ground, some of the energy of its downward motion is lost on impact. This energy is either absorbed by the surface of the ball as it compresses, or is released as heat. In general, the harder the ball, the less energy it loses (soft balls squash).

This assumes a hard surface. ‘Bounciness’ isn’t just about the thing bouncing, but also about what it is bouncing off. Drop a marble, or a ball bearing, on to soft sand and neither will bounce at all. All the energy passes into the sand. Drop either of them on to a steel anvil and they will comfortably out-bounce a rubber ball dropped from the same height.

The scientific term for the bounciness of an object is its ‘coefficient of restitution’ or COR. This is a scale measuring the energy that a material loses on impact. It runs from 0 for all energy lost, to 1 for no energy lost. Hard rubber has a COR of 0.8, but a glass ball can have a COR of up to 0.95.

That’s providing it doesn’t smash on impact. Astonishingly, nobody really knows why and how glass shatters. The
Third
International Workshop on the Flow and Fracture of Advanced Glasses
, a conference held in 2005 involving scores of scientists from all over the world, failed to reach agreement.

Many of the unique qualities of glass are a result of its not being a normal solid, but an amorphous (or ‘shapeless’) solid. Molten glass solidifies so quickly that its molecules don’t have time to settle into a regular crystalline lattice. This is because glass contains small amounts of soda (sodium carbonate) and lime (calcium oxide) that interfere with the structure of the silica (silicon dioxide) atoms as they cool. Without these additions, the silica would cool more slowly. This would form chemically neat and regular – but much less useful – quartz.

Some scientists think that given enough time – maybe billions of years – glass molecules will eventually follow suit and fall into line to form a true solid.

For now, though, they’re like cars in a traffic jam – they want to make orderly patterns but can’t because their neighbours are blocking the route. The visible result of this underlying chaos is smooth, transparent, mysterious glass.