🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Oddlets from United Kingdom.
The Blessing of a Good Thick Skirt
She fought a crocodile with a paddle, wore leeches like a fur collar, and insisted to her dying day that trousers were beneath her — so what, exactly, did the skirt save her from?
The Long Walk Home
In 1841 a celebrated English poet walked out of his asylum and covered eighty miles in four days, eating grass and his own pipe tobacco, to reach a childhood sweetheart he was certain was waiting for him.
The Surgeon Who Believed
What does a royal surgeon do after publishing a forty-page pamphlet certifying that a clothier's wife gave birth to rabbits, four days before she confesses?
Lord Berners and the Elephant Problem
What happens when a man Stravinsky called Britain's best composer places a classified ad selling elephants he doesn't own — and names the buyers?
The Giggling Mycologist
What kind of person gets laughed out of the British scientific establishment and leaves giggling?
The Man Who Collected the World by the Ton
What happens when a man's collection outgrows every method of counting except weight?
The Thrupenny Fix
What happens when the Air Ministry is years from a fix, pilots are dying in stalls, and a five-foot carburetor researcher has a home workshop and a motorcycle?
The Princess of Parallelograms
What happens when you raise a poet's daughter on pure mathematics and ban every verse from the house?
Sir Thomas Phillipps Wanted Every Book in the World
What happens when a man who sleeps on a sofa because his bedroom is full of manuscripts finally has to move houses?
The Woman Who Became Her Own Mystery
If the world's greatest mystery writer vanished for eleven days and registered at a hotel under her husband's mistress's name, what exactly was she solving?
The Man Who Died in a Meeting
He grafted a human tooth onto a rooster's head to see what would happen. It grew.
The Woman Who Wrote From Inside a Wall
A bishop sealed her inside a stone room, and she stayed for forty years — then T.S. Eliot quoted her during the Blitz.