Julian, Dick, Anne.....

The first contact many children in my generation (and older and younger ones) had with England and the English people came mainly through Enid Blyton’s books. In the beginning, it was Famous Five and their adventures, then it was the Secret Seven’s turn, and as we grew older the girls at Malory Towers and Saint Clare's fascinated us with that strange school world of common rooms, uniforms, lacrosse and dining halls long before Hagwarts was conceived…. But if anything at all stirred our imagination, that was, no doubt, the name of a (non-alcoholic) drink: GINGER BEER !!!Times are a-changing, and so are the Famous Five, as you can read here. If you still feel curious about ginger beer, try your own one with this recipe!.

If you want to go on reading about Enid Blyton and her books, browse the Enid Blyton society website by clicking here. What Enid Blyton character are you? Try this quiz and let us know and if you feel like singing, here's your chance with the Famous Five opening theme....

Facts and Fiction

Isaac Newton's notebooks provide us with really interesting facts about his studies, his personality and his own life. From How to make excellent good writing ink or An easy way to lessen or enlarge a picture to his lists of expenses or money lent to friends and college partners, this webpage will give you factual information so that your imagination can change it into fiction......

An easy way to lesson or enlarge a picture

Make a square, & then divide it into

divers equall parts with the compasses, & draw o'rethwart lines with a ruler & a pensill, so that the pictur be divided into equall squares, & so make squares on a faire paper as little or big as you will, but let ther bee soemany, as there is in the picture, then observing the order of the squares draw the pictur over with a pensill pasing

from square to square.

A is for Apple

What can you see in this picture? Let's consider some simple answers for a simple question: "There is a tree in front of a country house" "It looks like the English countryside" "The tree looks like a fruit tree"....Then, someone could look at the picture again and add "I can see an apple on the ground....the tree must be an apple tree..." And here lies the difference: It IS an apple tree and not an ordinary apple tree, but Sir Isaac Newton's Apple Tree at Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire (in the UK). It is believed that that tree inspired Newton's in 1665 when "the notion of gravity came to mind" after he watched an apple fall. The tree was a rare variety of Flower of Kent and some descendants of it grow now in different places in Cambridge, one in the back yard of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematicals Science, another one in the University Botanic Gardens. According to popular myth the apple actually hit his head and made him start thinking about it. However, according to his own notes, he was sitting indoors when THE APPLE fell off the tree. Whose side are you on?