MY QUIZ of 12 ... oddities, eccentricities, peculiarities ...

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MY QUIZ of 12 ... oddities, eccentricities, peculiarities ... ?

1.  A poisoned chalice.  The gods have played a cruel trick on us.  A one-off geological inheritance that was never meant to be exploited with such gay abandon.  It was the apple on the tree that we were never meant to take, let alone partake of as we have done, for 300 years.  But we can hardly blame our ancestors, can we?  I expect, we would each have done exactly the same.  Perhaps, a serious flaw in our human nature!

What is in the chalice?

2.  Name the largest UK town without a railway station that it had for 100 years, successfully, until 50 years ago. It now gets a tram stop and Innovation Centre with a 2 Km test track, instead!

3.  "In October, the BLANK October on record according to the EU’s climate monitoring service." (Directors' Report 2019 from Operation Noah)

Fill in the blank.

4.  Who said,

"We have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of the earth itself."  Quoted by Andrew Marr, p 480 in 'A History of Modern Britain' (owned by Mike Verduyn and bequeathed to his grandson Jonathan).

5.  Name earth's sister planet and what makes it so?

6.  Munros, Tops, Corbetts, Grahams, Donalds, Bridges, Nuttalls, Marilyns, Furths.

Where do you find them?

7.  For a few years, which UK city had "a concrete collar" named by the very planners who had built it?

8.  Not many people know this useless piece of information: What can you legally do on a public footpath that you may not want to do?

9.  Since the 1990s, how many times has Centenary Square been rebuilt, including its latest incarnation in 2019 at £16 m construction cost?

10. What was the name of the newest national park, announced by the authorities in August 2019?

11. "It would a lovely city if they could only finish building it!"  What on earth do they mean?

12.  Any suggestions for filling in the BLANKS in this sentence that are not expletives but really polite, descriptive and accurate?  I'm sure I must have had a rich vocabulary in mind at the time and I wish I could remember what the polite English was!  Can you help me out, please?

When you have a BLANK, BLANK, BLANK 56 Kms blankety gap in the middle of a mainline railway of "national strategic significance" between Worcester and Derby, do you really shuttle passengers across the gap using "bus on rails" trams, a Very Light Rail test track and cycle hire, as is happening? 

Tim Snr