There is in fact surprisingly little chance of forgetting it. After the failure to blow up the English Parliament in 1605, it was subsequently enshrined in English law in the 1605 Thanksgiving Act to hold church services on the subject.

The act, amongst other things, pays tribute to the “most great, learned and religious King that ever reigned therein, enriched with a most hopeful and plentiful progeny”, and goes on to outline that every Sunday prior to the 5th November each year, every minister shall “give warning to his parishoners publicly in the church at morning prayer” and that after morning prayer or if they should preach upon the 5th, they must read through the act and display its content.

Within 10 years or so, the commemorative aspects had largely turned into a more festive occasion with drinking, and later turning to burning effigies as the factions of 17th Century Britain fought between Catholicism and Protestantism. The festive spirit does remain today across the south of England with local groups putting on parades and marching through the towns in the lead-up to 5th November where tens of thousands will gather in the small town of Lewes for fire, fireworks, effigy burning and so on.

The 2026 event included burning effigies of Fifa boss Gianni Infantino and UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

In 2016, the Japanese frozen-dessert company Akagi Nyugyo had to raise the price of their popular GariGari-kun ice pop from ¥60 to ¥70.

The executive team produced a one minute TV ad, showing the president and team bowing to the audience and apologising for the rise.

It was especially notable as it was only the second price rise in the history of the product - it was introduced in 1981 at a price point of ¥50, with the ¥60 price rise happening in 1991.

The first hydrant design for funnelling water to put out fires was patented and filed with the US Patent Office sometime prior to 1836, but the original filing was lost in a fire.

At the time the US PTO was housed in a former hotel - previously “Blodgett’s Hotel” - purchased in 1810, and housed the patent office, the post office and the local fire department.

Unfortunately, the fire department’s hose was not well maintained, and nearly 10,000 patent applications were burned - the building collapsed in less than 20 minutes, taking thousands of drawings and models with it.

A call was put out to patent-holders to submit copies of records, of which some 2,800 were resubmitted but any others that were not, including the original fire hydrant design, were voided, and the record of who filed them is lost to time for them.

History’s best guess currently credits Frederick Graff Sr., chief engineer of Philadelphia’s water works system.

The first two versions of Windows included a Reversi game, but it was 1990’s Windows 3.0 that featured the infamous card game. It was written by Wes Cherry, then an intern at Microsoft. His girlfriend, Leslie Kooy, drew some of the card backs, and designer Susan Kare doing the rest of the card art.

Originally it was just a thing to make to get used to writing for Windows, but one of the program managers at Microsoft realised that it had potential for other things.

Windows prior to 3.0 supported mice, but it wasn’t exactly standard in the 1980s. Windows 3.0 intended to make the mouse the primary method of driving Windows, and the program manager realised it was a nice way to introduce people to using a mouse, to dragging and dropping, and having a fun way to practice. As a later interview would put it, the executives hoped it would “soothe people intimidated by the operating system.”

While many of the things Food is Art sells are somewhat predictable - including chocolate teapots (though they are solid) - some of the more infamous art stunts have made news.

There was an instance of a ‘100% chocoate pop-up pub’ in London, a 5m by 2m recreation of a pub environment made from half a ton of chocolate in association with Carlsburg for Easter 2016.

There was also a campaign to sell ‘edible audibles’ - vinyl record-like discs made from chocolate that could play music on a turntable. The original run for Christmas 2018 was selling recordings of the town band’s version of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”

During the end of WWII, there were incidents of British soldiers leaving their tanks for a break - and to make tea - only to be ambushed because it is the point at which tank crews are weakest.

So from 1945, British tanks were equipped with ‘boiling vessels’. This is for heating water inside the tank, which is for heating rations, amongst other things, but it has also lead to the claim that British tanks are explicitly equipped with tea-making facilities. It is - technically - true that tanks ship with tea-making facilities but it wasn’t the point of the exercise.

But few examples are quite like Iron Maiden’s frontman, Bruce Dickinson. Not content with being an international level duellist, he became a commercially licensed airline pilot in the 1990s, flying Boeing 757s.

In particular, when the band embarked on their 2008-09 “Somewhere Back In Time World Tour”, the band had chartered a 757, dubbed “Ed Force One” which was decorated in the band’s logo along the fuselage and their mascot, Eddie, on the tailfin - and Bruce flew the band, crew and equipment.

For the 2016 “The Book of Souls World Tour”, the band had upgraded to a Boeing 747-400 ‘jumbo jet’, for which Dickinson had to obtain a suitable type-rating as an upgrade to be able to fly it. This jet was also dubbed Ed Force One, and decorated in Iron Maiden imagery.

It is a single continuous shot, without audio, of a brick wall painted white and proceeding to dry.

Shackleton created it as a protest statement; for film-makers to have their films screened, they must be rated by classification boards, this has a cost based on the length of the film in question. Shackleton raised nearly £6,000 via Kickstarter to make this as long as possible for the BBFC to classify it since they would have to watch the entirety of it to ensure it did not contain anything inappropriate.

The film has a U - Universal, Suitable for All classification.

There is a cousin of the palindrome, known as the semordnilap. This is where you take a word, reverse the letters and end up with a different word, e.g. ‘stressed’ backwards is ‘desserts’. ‘drawer’ / ‘reward’ is another, or ‘strap’ / ‘parts’.

The word is of course, the word ‘palindromes’ reversed to form ‘semordnilap’, and as such is also autological, as in it describes what it is.

This year’s opens today, “The Great Pretender’s Gala” ahead of celebrating what would have been Freddie’s 80th birthday (from 5 September 1946), and is being held at the Casino Barrière, Montreux, Switzerland - formerly Mountain Studios where Queen recorded some of their albums, and where there is a statue of Freddie Mercury overlooking Lake Geneva.

All proceeds of the event go to the Mercury Phoenix Trust to fight HIV/AIDS worldwide.

Mountain Studios is also the place where the events memoralised in the song Smoke on the Water occurred, when the venue caught fire in 1971, cementing the varied and deep musical connections to the place.