🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Oddlets from United Kingdom.
Present But Not Voting
What kind of man spends sixty-three years perfecting the instructions for his own stuffed body?
The Cartwheel Brims
A loom took half her scalp at thirteen; she spent the next eighty-seven years deciding what the world was allowed to see.
The Cure He Boiled Away
In 1747 he proved two oranges and a lemon cured scurvy. Then he spent forty years boiling the cure into a syrup that didn't work.
The Beast of Netherwood
What does the wickedest man in the world order for breakfast when he's a sixty-nine-year-old pensioner in a Hastings boarding house?
The Only Englishman to Win the Iron Cross
What does a Soho safecracker have to do to get personally decorated by the Nazis?
The Ping-Pong Ball
What are the odds the first autobiography in English survived because a colonel hunting a ping-pong ball was talked out of burning it?
The Schoolboy Who Kidnapped a General
Expelled at eighteen for holding a greengrocer's daughter's hand, he was saluted through twenty-two German checkpoints eleven years later wearing a stolen general's cap.
Time Me, Gentlemen
He operated with the bloodied blade clamped between his teeth, and the students in the gallery held up their pocket watches to time him.
The World's Best Loser
A Glasgow grocer spent thirty-one years and five yachts chasing the same silver cup, and lost every single race.
The Architect Who Wore a Sailor's Coat
Who designs the gilded ceilings of British democracy in pilot trousers and jack-boots, then sails out to pull drowning men from the Goodwin Sands?
A House for Foss
A Victorian poet built a second house identical to his first, same rooms, same floor plan, so his cat wouldn't feel disoriented.
The Man Who Was Grimaldi
What does it cost a man to teach the world how to fall down for a living?