Cruel Britannia

The last four days have seen a slew of facts about this very sceptred isle, starting back on Thursday (as this seems to always be the day that the learning tails off) when Powys, a county in mid-Wales, was named as the happiest place in the country. I recently went camping in Powys, and have to say I'm not surprised - it's all rolling hills and stony streams, plus in Builth Wells there's a Burger King where they've employed a teenager with an especially dramatic voice to call out the orders. It's a laugh a minute out there. Edinburgh came bottom, whilst the only London borough to score highly was Sutton. I don't know exactly what the science behind this study is, but may I suggest it has something to do with lots of place names on bits of paper and an upturned hat.

Knowledge Towers' home borough, Wandsworth, may not be all that happy, but it's got a lot going for it - a disused power station, an outdoor swimming pool and a labyrinthine railway junction, to name but all. It's also fairly star-studded - Wandsworth residents include the intentionally hilarious Harry Hill, the unintentionally hilarious Ainsley Harriott, tennis gobshite Andy Murray and World's Biggest Badass, Lost's Sayid Jarrah. OK, the actor who plays him - who lives in LA now. Naveen Andrews was born in Wandsworth. That's literally the best thing that's ever happened here.

Heading onto the South Circular and out into the regions, past the residents of Powys, delirious with jubilation, on past the city of Edinburgh, literally collapsing under the weight of its own misery, we arrive at the shores of Loch Ness, a massive body of water famous for its mythical Jurassic inhabitant. If you look at a map of the UK, Loch Ness cuts in a straight line right across the northwest corner of Scotland - I learnt from a repeat of Britain From Above that this is because it follows a faultline, a feature that an expert claimed "without wanting to sound too dramatic" was the UK's equivalent of the San Andreas Fault. Which is pretty dramatic. He also mentioned that Loch Ness holds more water than all the lakes in England and Wales put together - a statement that needs no extra gravitas.

For Sunday's slice o' learning, we're moving even further North, to the very edge of the land, the Shetland Islands, nestled somewhere between Iceland, Scotland, Venezuela, Beirut and Switzerland. It's the northernmost part of the UK, and it is also the fattest - although this comes from another less than scientific study which has been rebuked by Shetland MSP Tavish Scott (yes, it's his real name) and the area's health improvement officer (who may have had a couple of sleepless nights recently) who added that the islands have "fantastic" leisure centres, but admitted with a weary shrug that they are slightly under-used. She then returned to her car and sat, gently weeping, munching through a carrier bag full of pork pies.