A labourer faces jail after pleading guilty to driving a Volkswagen Polo at high speed on to the Brands Hatch circuit during a race.
Jack Cottle, 22, hit speeds of up to 100mph with two passengers on board after gatecrashing an endurance race at the famous track in Kent on June 14. Maidstone Crown Court heard he performed the stunt after being dared by friends in a “foolish prank”, putting the lives of racers in danger.
Cottle pleaded guilty to “causing a nuisance to the public by driving on to the race track at Brands Hatch while an endurance race was in progress”. Judge Martin Joy warned Cottle, of Durgates in Wadhurst, East Sussex, that a “custodial sentence is on the cards” when he next appears in court on the week beginning November 17.
Doomed menu up for auction
A deck plan and the only surviving menu from the Titanic’s first-class restaurant are expected to be sold for up to £100,000 at auction next week.
The deck plan was used by Elise Lurette to find her way to the lifeboats after the passenger liner hit an iceberg in April 1912. More than 1,500 passengers and crew drowned but Ms Lurette, a 59-year-old French-born maid, survived.
Also in Ms Lurette’s coat pocket when she was rescued was a lunch menu, featuring mutton chops, roast beef and Melton Mowbray pie. The documents, which have remained in the Lurette family, will be sold by Titanic memorabilia specialists Henry Aldridge & Son, in Devizes, Wiltshire, on October 18.
£84,000 to raise a child to 11
The average cost of raising a child to secondary school age will set parents back almost £84,000, according to a survey.
Caring for a child from birth until the age of 11 will cost a household almost half the average UK house price, which stood at £187,188 in September, Halifax found.
The bulk of the total £83,627 bill comes from childcare before children reach school age, which at about £41,139 makes up almost half of the whole cost of raising a child to the age of 11. The estimates were taken from research among 1,000 parents of children aged up to 11.
Wikipedia worship in Poland
A Polish town is to put up a monument to honour the authors of Wikipedia, the internet encyclopaedia which allows anyone to contribute, according to a university professor who suggested the idea.
Krzysztof Wojciechowski, director of the Collegium Polonicum in Slubice, said he is in awe of the huge and reliable job done by Wikipedia, which is hugely popular in Poland. More than a million entries in Wikipedia are in Polish, rivalling the number in French or Spanish.
“I’m ready to drop to my knees before the Wikipedia, that’s why I thought of a monument where I could do it,” Wojciechowski said. The 47,000 zlotys (€10,200) fibre and resin statue is being funded by Slubice authorities and will be unveiled on October 22.
Capsule curiosity from lion statue
Historians who opened a small copper box that had been hidden in the head of a lion statue on a building in Boston, US, for more than a century got a small surprise: a hardback book.
In addition to the expected papers, the Bostonian Society found the small red book inside the box which is roughly the size of a shoebox. The book had no visible markings, and nothing was taken out of the box because of the items’ fragile condition, so the contents of the book remain a mystery.
Society president Brian LeMay said he was “absolutely delighted” by the discovery. The time capsule was sealed inside the lion’s head in 1901. Rumours of its existence were confirmed last month when the statue was taken down from the Old State House for refurbishing.