A Lot Of Soap!

The little bar of soap in your hotel bathroom is all part of the service. But it's big business for somebody.

Look at it this way. The buyer for an English chain of hotels calculates that the avarage guest stays for 1.6 nights. (That doesn't mean that he pack his bags at three o'clock in the morning on the the second night. It just means that guests sometimes stay one night, and they sometimes stay two.)

Every guest gets a new bar of soap.

The hotel probably works at about seventy per cent of capacity. In other words, in a hotel with a hundred bedrooms, seventy of the rooms are occupied all the time.

In one year a hundred-bedroom hotel needs nearly sixteen thousand bars of soap.

The luxurious Savoy Hotel in London has two hundred bedrooms. Down the road, the Regent Palace has 1032 rooms. The owners of the Regent Palace (Trust House Forte) have two hundred hotels in the United Kingdom - not to mention the eight hundred that they own in the rest of the world.

That's an awful lot of soap.

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A Parson's Rassion

The Reverend Henry Morgan hid his excitement. He left the church quietly and walked home. He hung-up his cassock and put on an oil-stained pair of overalls.

The year was 1910. An Anglican vicar in Worcestershire was about to test-drive the car that his son had built (Church of England vicars are allowed to marry). It had three wheels and was driven by a chain. The front suspension was his own invention. And he was worldly enough to patent it.

Friends and parishioners were so nthusiastic that they begged him to build cars for them too. And that was the beginning of Morgan cars. Morgans are still built by hand in Worcestershire. The company is run by the old parson's family. And they still have the same front suspension. They got rid of the chain ages ago, and added an extra wheel in 1949. A hundred or so people turn out about nine cars a week.

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Kings of Speed

Three names dominated the record books in the first half of this century - Seagrave, Campbell and Cobb.

Sir Henry Seagrave drove a Sunbeam and in 1927 raised the world land speed record to 203.9 mph (about 320.27 kph).

Sir Malcolm Campbell drove his own car, Bluebird, and broke the record nine times - finally raising it over the magic figure of 300 mph (500 kph) in 1935.

John Cobb grew up near Brooklands, the famous race track. Fast cars were his obsession. His first race was in an immense pre-war Fiat in 1925. But he broke world records over the next twelve years in a Delage and in a Napier-Railton.

As the speed of these super-cars increased, it became more difficult to find somewhere to race them. Since the thirties the favourite venue has been the Bonneville Salt Flats in the U.S.A. Cobb's speed there in 1938 was 585 kph. But in 1970 Gary Gabelich, an American, raised it to a staggering 1050 kph.

John Cobb died on Loch Ness in 1952 - seconds after raising the water-speed record to 200 mph.

Sir Malcom Campell's son, Donald, died on Derwent Water in the Lake District fifteen years later-seconds after raising that record to 328 mph.

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Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a could

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

___

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milk way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance,

___

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling wawes in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed and gazed but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

___

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth

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The First of The Romantics

William Wordsworth spent his long life in one of the most beautiful regions of England the lake District.

He and his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge revolutionized English peotry in 1798 when they published The Lyrical Ballads.

They were the first Romantics, and paved the way for poets like Keats, Shelley and Lord Byron. They made two enormous changes in the language of poetry, and in the subject matter.

Wordsworth used the language of simple, country people. And he wrote about Nature Coleridge wrote about the supernatural. Compared with the poetry that went before them, it was like the difference between a highly ornamental garden and the natural landspace of the lakes.

But for all its simplicity, Wordsworth's language is still unusual. He often reverses the order of subject and verb for example. When he remembered the excitement of being in France during the French Revolution (he was nineteen years old at the time) he wrote :

'Bliss was it that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven.'

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A Common Language

The British and Americans are divided by a common language somebody once said. And there certainly are differences between Americans and British English.

In England yo walk on the pavement; In the United States you keep on the sidewalk. Uncle Sam puts gasolene in his car, while the English fill up with petrol. New York is linked to Chicago by railroad; whereas a railway takes you from London to Manchester.

There are plenty of differences, but the most striking is the difference of accent. All in all the American accent is more nasal and they tend to pronounce the letter 'r' when an Englishman usually doesn't in a sentence like this, for example: 'Can you park your car in the dark?'

But what kind of American are we talking about? And what kind of Englishman ? There are dozens of different dialects in the British Isles, and more in the United States.

A Londoner often finds it easier to understand an American than someone from the Nort East of England. And in New York a man from Oxford is no easily understood than a Texan.

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The British Police

There are a hundred and eight thousand policemen in Britain and eleven thousand policewomen. One for every five hundred members of the population.

They are divided into forty-four regional forces.

The Home Secretary may have overall responsibility for the police, but the different forces come under the jurisdiction of the local police committe in each area. Although about twenty per cent are trained marksmen, the British police do not usually carry guns. The exceptions are the airport police, who have to deal with the threat of hijacking, and the police who guard diplomatic personnel.

Instead, the ordinary police carry a 'truncheon' (wooden baton) concealed in a special pocket down the inside of the trouser leg.

Traditionaly a British policeman is called a 'Bobby' after Sir Robert (Bobby) Peel who founded the police.

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Keep Left

As you drive, away from the ferry boat, there is a large signpost on your left. It tells you about speed limits in England.

Unfortunately, there isn't time to read it, unless you stop and cause a traffic jam.

But the speed limits are well signposted on country roads-in miles per hour. 50 mph is approximately 80 kph, and 60 mph is about 100 kph. The limit on motorways is 70 mph (that's about 115 kilometres an hour) frustrating if you happen to be driving a Ferrari.

In towns you have to keep below thirty (that's about 50 kph).

The law is much the same from one country to another. You have to wear a seat belt in Britain, so does your passenger. At night you have to put your headlights on, not just your side lights. And it's not a good idea to park near pedestrian crossings. If you do, you'll find the car at the police station.

Don't drink and drive. But, above all, remember. Keep left.

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The Church of England

Westminister Abbey stands in the heart of London, next to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.

It is the burial place of statesmen, and poets. Kings and Queens are crowned there. It is one of the oldest institutions of the Church of England.

Five minutes walk away is Westminister Cathedral, the huge, red-brick cathedral of the Roman Catholic Church-hidden behind a modern department store, but solemn and awe-inspiring when you enter it.

The Roman Catholic cathedrals of England are all relatively modern. This is bacuse until law was changed in 1829, the Roman Catholic Church was not allowed to build any. The offical religion of the country was, and still is Anglicanism (Church of England).

But, in actual fact, almost all the Cathedrals in the country were originally Catholic. They were built before the 16th Century.

The Church of England only came into existence in the year 1534. King Henry VIII decided that the Pope in Rome, in alliance with the King of Spain, was beginning to have too much influence over English affairs.

Henry VIII wanted to terminate his marriage to Catherine of Aragon his Spanish wife. The Pope, as head of the Church, refused to give him permission. So Henry broke away from the Church of Rome, made himself head of the Church of England. And gave himself permission to divorce Catherine.

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Get Weaving

'Oh, I am a bachelor. I live all alone. And I work at the weaving trade. And the only, only thing. That I ever did wrong. Was to woo a fair, young maid.'

The bachelor hero of this famous folk song worked in the oldest industry in England. He was a weaver.

The British learned how to spin and weave wool under The Roman occupation, nearly two thousand years ago. And the wool industry remained the most important source of England's wealth, until the arrival of cotton at the end of the 18th century.

Naturally enough wool has left its mark on the language: A dyed in the wool conservative is a person who is thoroughly and completely conservative in his beliefs.

To pull the wool over someone's eyes is to deceive or dupe them.

But the most commonly heard expression is Get weaving! (It means 'make an energetic start'). It is also a typical use of the word get. In fact the word get always means 'make an energetic start' when it is followed by the -ing form of a verb.

People frequently say: I must get moving when they are about to leave.

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