Some interesting facts. Did you know?

1. 10% of the world’s population speak English as their mother tongue (Chinese 21%, Spanish 6%, Russian 6%, Malay 4%, Hindi 4%, Japanese 3%, Arabic 3%, Portuguese 3%, French 2%, German 2%)

2. Rains of many kinds of living creatures have actually been reported from earliest times and all over the world. On 28th May 1881, during a thunderstorm on the outskirts of Worcester, England, tons of periwinkles and small hermit crabs fell on Cromer Gardens Road and the surrounding fields.

3. The alarm clock was not invented by the Marquis de Sade, as some suspect, but rather by a man named Levi Hutchins of Concord, New Hampshire, in 1787. Perversity, though, characterized his invention from the beginning. The alarm on his clock could ring only at 4 am. Rumor has it that Hutchins was murdered by his wife at 4:05 am on a very dark and deeply cold New England morning.

4. A man named Sir Henry Wyat was sentenced to the Tower of London, at a time when prisoners generally starved to death. Sir Henry’s kitty-cat seemed to understand the situation because she snuck into the Tower bringing him a freshly-killed pigeon every day. When the king heard of this, he must have felt sad for the kitty, because he immediately set Sir Henry free.

5. Heathrow Airport handles more international passengers than any other airport in the world and offers flights to many international destinations including 33 flights to Paris and 23 flights to New York each day. The most popular country for flights from Heathrow is the United States of America. The busiest routes are New York, Paris, Amsterdam and Dublin.

Suburban life

This is how house agents describe a semi-detached house in a language of their own: “For sale. Compact semi-detached residence in select suburb. Three bed., two receipt., kitchen and bathroom, garage space, nice garden”.

A residence is here merely a house. A compact residence makes the best of the fact that it is a very small house. There is, of course, no central heating, or it would have been advertised as a “luxury residence”. “Semi-detached” makes it sound loose and unstable, but, in fact, it means that it is joined as a twin to a similar house.

Besides, the “nice garden” is mostly at the back and is entirely surrounded by nice gardens of other compact residences. There is a small gap at the side of your house, between it and the next pair of Siamese twins. Your half of this gap may be wide enough to provide standing-room for a car. That is what the house agent means by “garage space”.

In the suburbs of Britain’s towns there must be several million compact residences with three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and two rooms and a kitchen downstairs. There live the large suburban nation who form the tidal wave of passengers surging by train and bus to the offices and shops in the centre of the towns and ebbing away to the suburbs at night. They know that travelling in the rush-hours is horrible, but they would rather do that than bring up their children in a flat ten or twelve floors up in the middle of the city.

Living in a suburb involves certain rules to conform to. Gardening, for instance. Your back-garden may be a jungle of weeds, but you are expected to look after the patch in the front. Ideally, it should be fall of bright colours. Ifs all a matter of how things look to passersby in the street. And it is not done to start being very sociable the moment you move in. There’s a convention that you do not start a conversation over the fence when your neighbour appears in his back-garden. You usually can’t fail to see him but you must ignore him except fora “good afternoon”. Some people even maintain the fiction that anyone in his back-garden is, for social purposes, invisible.

CANALS

Canals arc very useful. Ships and boats in the sea or on rivers can carry heavy things a long way. They are slow, but they use very little power. In the 18th century the industrial revolution began in Britain. People wanted to carry coal, iron and other heavy materials. Sometimes boats travelled along large rivers like the Thames or the Mersey, but often there was no river. The first canals joined two rivers. Boats from one river travelled along the canal to the other river.

In the late 18^th century people built canals all over Britain. Canal boats, called barges, did not have sails or motors. Barges were pulled by horses. They walked along a path beside the canal and pulled the barges.

In the 19^th century people started to build railways. The new railways carried heavy things more quickly than the old canals. By the middle of the 20^th century most of the canals were empty. No one wanted to use them. Then people began to use the canals for holidays. They bought old canal barges. They cleaned and repaired them. Then they built kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms and sitting rooms inside the old barges.

Today, canal holidays are very popular. Some people like to use the old barges but others prefer modern holiday boats. A canal holiday is quiet and relaxing because you escape from the stress and traffic of the roads. On a canal holiday you can see a different side of Britain.