Dear Reader,

I hope you’ve had a Happy Christmas. Today we thought we’d share 22 things we’ve learnt in 2022. There will be no issue tomorrow, but we are back on Wednesday.

Please don’t forget to share The Knowledge with your friends and family before the end of the year, for a chance to win a £500 John Lewis voucher. Just share via WhatsApp or email below.

Share on WhatsApp

Share via email

All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor in chief

Noted

China’s navy is growing by the equivalent of the entire French fleet every four years. (CNBC)

Quirk of history

Women and children weren’t necessarily loaded on to the Titanic’s lifeboats first: 323 men escaped the sinking ship, mostly from the starboard (right) side of the ship, where the captain’s “women and children first” rule wasn’t enforced. Another misconception is that the third-class cabins were grim. “The food was excellent and they even had flushing toilets, unheard of for 1912,” says historian Claes-Göran Wetterholm. “The stewardesses in third class had to teach people how to use them.” (The Mail on Sunday)

Inside politics

Rwanda has an innovative approach to keeping the streets clean. On one Saturday morning every month, shops, bars and restaurants all close, and people are only allowed to leave their homes to clear up litter. Those who don’t help can be stopped in the street by police and made to start cleaning on the spot. (Rory Stewart, The Rest is Politics)

Weather

The reason the British monarch has two birthdays – one actual, one “official” – is because Edward VII got cheesed off that the weather on his November birthday was always miserable. So he chose a different day, in sunny June, and called that his birthday instead.

Noted

Thomas Edison was said to interview potential research assistants over a bowl of soup. The inventor wanted to see if they added salt and pepper before tasting their food or afterwards. Premature seasoners failed the test, as it showed they were overly reliant on assumptions and lacked curiosity. (Inc. magazine)

Life

Perhaps the most memorable Lunch with the FT, the paper’s long-established weekend interview, was with the poet Gavin Ewart in October 1995. The 79-year-old began the meal with several negronis, hardly an “amateur’s drink”, and carried on from there. The following day, the interviewer received a call from Mrs Ewart. “There are two things you need to know,” she said. “The first is that Gavin came home yesterday happier than I have seen him in a long time. The second – and you are not to feel bad about this – is that he died this morning.”

Noted

British people think their country is much more diverse than it actually is. Polls have shown that they believe 20% of the population is black (it’s 3%); 15% is Muslim (actually 4%); 5% transgender (no more than 0.6% in reality); and 15% gay and lesbian (in fact, 1.8%). They also think 20% of the country is vegan or vegetarian – the actual figure is 4%. (The Times)

Quirk of history

In 1901, Edward VII instituted “Sandringham time” at the royal estate. It was half an hour ahead of GMT, giving the King more daylight for hunting on winter evenings. Rather “unsportingly”, this “regal idiosyncrasy” was abolished by Edward VIII in 1936. (The Daily Telegraph)

Inside politics

During the state opening of parliament, an MP is effectively held hostage in Buckingham Palace – the idea being that if anything untoward happens to the monarch during the ceremony, the same fate would befall the MP. “They didn’t actually lock me up, but they made it quite clear that I wasn’t going anywhere,” Labour’s Jim Fitzpatrick said of his experience as the hostage in 2014. “When I [later] expressed my anxiety to the head of the Armed Forces, he said, ‘If anything happened to Her Majesty, Jim, we would have made it quick. We would have just shot you.’ And I don’t think he was kidding.” (BBC News)

Noted

Cleopatra, who lived from 69-30BC, was closer in time to the launch of the iPhone (2007) than the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza (around 2,600BC).

Quirk of history

During the D-Day landings, an officer called Brigadier Simon Fraser brought his own private piper. Bill Millin, a 21-year-old Scot, wore a kilt and played Highland Laddie “as he waded ashore through the waist-high, already bloodied water”. As the fighting continued he then walked slowly up and down the beach, playing Road to the Isles. Later, Millin “piped” his fellow soldiers through a village – a situation so dangerous he had to do it while running – and across a bridge while under sniper fire. He survived the war and lived until 2010. (The Sunday Times)

Eating in

The Queen never ate square sandwiches, according to former royal chef Graham Newbould. Tradition has it that anyone presenting the monarch with pointy-edged food “is trying to overthrow the throne of England”, he says. For afternoon tea, he served up circular “jam penny” sandwiches instead. (Channel 5)

Weather

Despite its pluvious reputation, London gets less rain than Rome, Venice and Nice, and southeast England has lower annual rainfall than Jerusalem and Beirut. The rainiest time of day in the UK is 7am, and the driest is 3am. Many animals have surprising ways of responding to wet weather: bees can tell when a shower is coming, so work longer hours the day before; Burmese monkeys sneeze uncontrollably whenever there’s a downpour; and owls are 70 times less likely to hoot when it’s raining. (The Oldie)

On the money

Salvador Dalí was a canny businessman – to avoid paying for meals he would simply doodle on the back of his cheques, knowing full well that restaurant owners would never cash them. Michael Jackson had the same idea: when the singer cancelled a concert in New York, he refunded ticket holders with hand-signed cheques. Fans were so excited to have their own pieces of Jackson memorabilia that fewer than one in 10 banked them. (Popbitch)

Quirk of history

The word happiness comes from the Old Norse word hap, which meant “chance, luck, fortune or fate”. That’s why we have words like perhaps, haphazard, and hapless. And it’s not just English – across every Indo-European language, the word for happiness is related to the word for luck. Our language “seems to be telling us something about existence”. (The Atlantic)