This week's UK news: 13 November 2014
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13 November 2014


Christmas gets earlier every year

The biggest  festival in the UK is Christmas, where we exchange presents, eat a special meal, and celebrate many traditions. But people say Christmas starts earlier every year, and it sounds as if they are right.

A researcher has looked at Google searches for Christmas dating back to 2007. He found that in that year, we did not start thinking about Christmas until November 11. Last year, we first started thinking about Christmas on August 25, more than two months earlier. His research showed that mostly, the date got a little earlier every year. He said his findings were "a little startling".

 

Are you sneezing?

Colds are minor illnesses where people get runny noses, headaches, sore throats and sneeze and cough a lot. A survey suggests that we mostly get one cold every ten weeks – or, at least, adults do. Children get twice as many colds because they are very efficient at spreading the infection.

People blame their colds on travelling to work on trains and buses, flying, and working in open-plan offices.

 

Cinema seats not big enough

One of the UK's oldest cinemas has had to replace all its seats because people's bottoms have got bigger. The Malvern Cinema, built a hundred years ago, used to have seats which were 17 inches wide. It has just replaced them with seats which are 21 inches wide. The cinema now has 40 fewer seats.

In Britain now, more than 60 per cent of people are classed as being overweight.

The cinema's boss said nobody had got stuck in the old seats, but as films were now much longer they wanted to make sure customers were comfortable. The new seats are the standard size for modern cinemas.

 

Some poppies to stay at the Tower of London

Millions of people in the UK have travelled to see the artwork of poppies at the Tower of London. On Tuesday, which is Remembrance Day marking the end of World War I, the final poppy was planted with 880,245 others by a 13 year old boy.

Each poppy represented a soldier who died fighting for the UK in World War I, and the boy who put the last one in place was 13, the age of the youngest soldier on the French battlefields.

On the following day, volunteers began to remove the poppies, which have all been sold to raise money for charity. There was a big campaign to keep the artwork there for longer, and it has now been decided that two displays of poppies will stay in place for two weeks before they travel around the country.

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