PERHAPS it says something about our education system, but many of the books in the shops - and under my Christmas tree - are trivia based.

No longer big, long reads in which you can immerse yourself for a whole holiday, but little dibbly-dabbly books - miscellanies and cornucopias - which you pick up for a few seconds until your attention span wanes.

Everything is truncated into a list or pared down into the pithiest biography of the most fascinating facts.

For those too lazy to bother even with these truncated books, I have truncated my entire Christmas reading:

In Japanese, the word 'bakkushan' means 'a woman who appears pretty when seen from behind but not from the front'.

Eddie Chapman, born in Burnopfield in 1914, became a leading London safe-cracker - his trademark was to poke a condom filled with gelignite through the lock before detonating it. He was arrested and imprisoned in Jersey but the Germans released him when they invaded in 1940. They trained him as a saboteur, parachuted him into Cambridgeshire and awarded him the Iron Cross - the first Englishman to receive such an award. But he was a double agent, sending back so much false information about the precision of the doodlebug flying bombs that the Germans put too much fuel in them so that they overshot London. After the war, in recognition of his service, charges of exploding more than 40 safes were dropped. He died in 1997.

The only place with a name beginning with Z in the North-East is Zion Hill Farm near Crayke on the North York Moors.

In the 1860s, the heavy wheels of carts and the galloping hooves of horses ground the stone road surface into dust and crushed the horse manure into a thick layer - in Barney in 1866, they paid a man with a hoe 15 shillings a week to scrape the impacted manure off the town's roads. But William Smith of that town rode to the rescue, inventing horsedrawn machines that scraped and swept the streets. In fact, they swept the world as his machines had to be adapted so that they could be drawn by mules in Egypt and bullocks in India.

Inuit words for snow include: qannialaag (light falling snow), natatgonaq (wet falling snow), taiga (soft and deep snow where snowshoes are required), ariloqaq (loose, newly fallen snow which cannot be used as it is but may be compacted into building material), aniusarpok (snow that a dog eats), tiluktorpok (snow that is beaten from clothes), qali (snow caught on the boughs of trees)...

Holy Island - a place of religious righteousness where man looks after his brother? Of course not. One visiting clergyman was told in 1643: "The common people there do pray for shippes which they see in danger...They pray not God to save you or to send you to the port, but to send you to them by shipwrack, that they may get the spoil...If the shippe come well to port, or eschew naufrage, they get up in anger crying: 'The Devil stick her, she is away from us'." The clergyman witnessed the local vicar fighting a gentryman over a box of gold hat-bands washed up from a wreck, "and the minister did sore wound the gentleman".

After being guillotined, the eyes in a person's head may blink for as long as 15 seconds. In 1905, a French murderer was guillotined and movement in his eyes suggested his head responded to his name for 25 seconds after the severing. Understanding this continued consciousness, Africans used to tie the ears of a man who was about to be decapitated to a bent, springly sapling. When the axe fell, his head would fly off which meant that his last feeling on earth was one of flying - giving him the impression that he was ascending into heaven.

But what has amazed me most is that in 1769, Nicolas Cugnot invented the first self-propelled road vehicle (a steam-driven military tractor with a top speed of 2mph), that in 1862 Jean Jospeh Etienne Lenoir invented the first car to use a petroleum-based fuel and that in 1885, Gottlieb Daimler created the prototype of the modern car engine. Yet here, on the brink of 2006, we still haven't invented a car door which can be opened without the snow sliding off the roof and falling onto the driver's seat (soqqytrowsas in Inuit).

Published: 31/12/2005