Curry goes to India

Seven chefs from the UK a cooking their own curry recipes in India. The chefs, who include one with a Michelin star rating, are cooking their own recipes to diners in Calcutta. The recipes include chicken tikka massala and Balti curries, both of which were created in the UK.
The cooks are taking part in a Curry Life festival to promote British Indian food as a distinct, if direct, descendant of India's cuisine. Other dishes include Anglo-Indian dishes balti naga chicken and Bengal Lancer shrimp curry.

Curry is one of the UK's favourite kinds of food. Recipes were brought back from the early 19th century. It became more popular after the early 1970s when migrants came, need restaurants, and created more dishes to British tastes. Food critics in India are not saying good things about the dishes being served in Calcutta but one of the British chefs said: "We want to experience authentic Indian food, but in doing that we want to share some of our own food and see how it's received."

Government staff spend thousands on speaking clock

In the UK you can still call a telephone number to be told the time. This has sometimes been done by people in offices who want to look busy. Last year the government department, the Ministry of Defence, banned staff from calling the number. Yet staff apparently spent more than GBP 18,000 in 2012 and 6,000 this year. In all, more than GBP 40,00 was spent since 2011. The department said there was a technical error with the phone system which was now fixed.

Germans tourists love British beaches

More than 500,00 Germans a year are visiting the UK coastline, more than any other nation. This was almost 20 per cent of all Germans visiting the UK compared with 13 per cent of those from France and 12 per cent of Americans.
East Sussex and Cornwall were particularly popular, partly because of coastal walks amd also a TV series shown in Germany.

The research looked at what attracted visitors to the UK. Our "rich sporting offer" came first, followed by music festivals, heritage, the mixture of "old and new" and the countryside. Some visitors though that Britain was a "romantic destination".

Children don't exercise enough

Half of seven year olds in the UK do not exercise for an hour every day. Half of the children surveyed by researchers sat for six hours or more each day.
Just 38 per cent of girls and 63 per cent of boys managed the recommended minimum of 60 minutes activity each day. Some children did much more exercise than this, which improved the average across the sample. Girls were found to be less active than boys.

The researchers said that more needed to be done to increase the exercise children did, including promoting walking or cycling to school.