DAVID ADAMS writes about the odder side of life…
• A UK cathedral has opened a mini-golf course in its nave in a bid to attract a younger crowd over the summer. Paid for by the Rochester Bridge Trust and designed by HM Adventure Golf, the nine hole course in the 1,400-year-old Rochester Cathedral in Kent, which opens to the public this week and can be played until September, was also designed to educate players about bridge-building and features models of various bridges including the nearby Rochester Bridge over the Medway (as well as in its original Roman form). The cathedral’s Rev Rachel Phillips, canon for mission and growth, expressed her hope that as they play golf, “visitors will reflect on the bridges that need to be built in their own lives and in our world today”. While not everyone is happy – one critic described the move as a “really serious mistake” – another of the cathedral’s staff, Canon Matthew Rushton, countered the nay-sayers by saying that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, had said that “if you don’t know how to have fun in cathedrals then you’re not doing your job properly”.
• Three seasaws were briefly placed across the US-Mexican border in a rebuke of US President Donald Trump’s rhetoric concerning the building of a border wall. The pink seasaws were unveiled straddling the border fence between Sunland Park in the US state of New Mexico and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, allowing children and adults on either side to join in the teetertottering fun. The installation was the brainchild of two Californian professors – Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture at the University of California Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, a professor of design at San Jose University. Images of the seesaws were trending on social media this week. Sadly, the seesaws, which were installed on Saturday, were removed later that day.
• Plaid-wearers celebrate! Some 1,359 people, all wearing plaid patterns, gathered in the Canadian city of Kenora last weekend to set a new Guinness World Record. The ‘PLAIDurday” event, organised by a local radio station, smashed the previous record of 1,146 set in the US city of Atlanta in 2015. In other world records set recently, a German adhesives company reportedly used its glue to keep a truck suspended off the ground for an hour. The glue held.
This article was updated on 1st August.
