Happy Anniversary: Top week for bananas
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Your support makes all the difference.HERE are some things to celebrate in the forthcoming seven days, a bad week for formal greetings, but good for bananas:
5 April:
1895: Oscar Wilde arrested on charges arising from his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas.
1910: Kissing banned on French railways because it might cause delays.
6 April:
1928: Handshaking banned in Rome on grounds of hygiene.
1984: Zola Budd granted British citizenship.
It is also believed to be the feast day of St Elstan (or Elfstan), a monk and community cook at Abingdon, trained by St Ethelwold, on whose orders he plunged his hand into boiling water. It emerged unscathed. He died in 981.
7 April:
1832: James Thompson sells his wife in Carlisle, after reducing the asking price from 50 shillings to 20 shillings and a Newfoundland dog.
1943: The hallucinogenic drug LSD is first synthesized.
8 April:
1986: Clint Eastwood elected as Mayor of Carmel, California.
9 April:
1747: Lord Lovat becomes the last person to be beheaded in England. It was a method of execution restricted exclusively to noblemen.
10 April:
1633: Bananas first appear on sale in Britain.
1849: Walter Hunt, of New York, patents the safety pin.
1988: China records the first case of a dog being frightened to death by television violence. The animal was startled by a scene in a German film, and ran wildly around the room until it died of a heart attack.
11 April:
1855: London's first pillar boxes are installed; they are green.
1929: Popeye first appears in a cartoon strip.
1930: New York scientists predict that a man will land on the moon by the year 2050.
1939: Glasgow bans playing darts in pubs because it is too dangerous.
1980: Dr Canaan Banana becomes the first president of Zimbabwe.
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