Indeed. A significant part of gaining skills in creative writing is learning to 'read as a writer'. How to examine classic texts to understand how to develop scenes, characters, narrative styles, etc.

(Iambic pentameters are 10-syllable lines with alternate syllables unstressed and stressed, like "if MUSic BE the FOOD of LOVE ...", the so-called heartbeat rhythm)

Shakespeare actually used a variety of different styles to demarcate different characters, moods, etc. As a very rough rule-of-thumb in Shakespeare, posh characters speak in iambic pentameters, commoners and clowns speak in prose. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, the Athenians speak in iambic pentameters and the clowns speak in prose. When the clowns put on a play for the Athenians, the clowns and the Athenians swap speaking styles, so the Athenians make snarky comments in prose (just like a badly behaved audience) on the badly rhymed acting of the clowns. The fairies, meanwhile, speak in trochaic verse, so their king and queen sound stylistically different from their Athenian equivalents, almost like Shakespeare has given them a foreign accent. When two characters are arguing, the ten syllables of a normal line are sometimes split between them to emphasize the back and forth nature. If a character is flustered or annoyed, their lines may be obviously different from the 10 syllable norm, again to emphasize their mood.

For actors learning their lines, the syllable counts almost act as stage direction hints: if they aren't 10 syllables, then some mood or other needs to be taken into account.

Most of their advertising / info is probably on Facebook.

Their physical store is in Bishop Auckland, a small town a few miles south of Durham.

My niece runs a business that relies on the way we discard clothes. She buys clothes from suppliers in India who source them from the bales of discarded clothes sent to them from Europe. Her suppliers have in effect sorted through the mountain of discards to find the ones that have sufficient value to sell back to us. She specifically buys clothes that have 'vintage' appeal (think tailored jackets rather than hoodies) and sells them primarily to students in a northern English city. Her business has done well enough to move from market stalls to a dedicated high street store and she is just branching out into 'vintage' kids clothes.

Challenges (apart from the time taken) are coming up with a good enough gene representation that captures the essence of the problem, building an efficient fitness function, and avoiding local maxima - i.e. a solution that is almost but not quite good enough, but from where you can't breed a better solution.,

The air may be the same everywhere, but roads and safety laws aren't.

(which I am now keen to use in an actual conversation)

I'm continuing with this initiative by proposing a new variant on Haggis: "Shepheard's Haggis". It's basically a Shepheard's pie - which is essentially lamb mince+stuff topped with mashed potato - made using haggis instead of mince. If I have any leftover gravy in the freezer that gets mixed into the haggis to moisten it a bit. I've making this for years.

For added heresy I replace the neeps with baked beans, themselves livened up with some sumac or similar.

As you say, with retrospect we can see the Aeolipile as a tech demo, but at the time it was an interesting novelty with zero practical application.

The Aeolipile was not a functional steam engine - it was essentially an unpressurised two-spouted kettle that span on an axle. It had no way of maintaining enough pressure (no valves) to do useful work and the metal working techniques of the day weren't good enough to contain useful pressure without exploding. Real steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode.

The first practical application of steam engines was pumping water out of deep coal mines (which the Romans didn't have or need) where it didn't matter if the engine was both underpowered and massive. Even after these engines became commercially viable, it took another 70 years or so for the engines to become small enough to be mounted on vehicles.