A Penny For The Guy

On the fifth of November onfires are lit all over Britain. The tradition began in 1605.

A band of discontented English Catholics hatched a plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament while king James I was present. One of the conspirators betrayed the plot and the buildings were searched from top to bottom.

In the cellars of the House of Lords the King's men found a man called Guy Fawkes. He had the difficult task of explaining how he came to be surrounded by thirty-six barrels of gunpowder.

Guy Fawkes showed great courage under interrogation and torture. But eventually the names of his fellow conspirators were extracted from him.

He was executed in 1606. Guy Fawkes Day has been commemorated ever since. Children burn an effigy of the unfortunate conspirator on their bonfires.

For several weeks before November 5th they display their 'guy' on the pavement and collect money for fireworks. They ask passers-by for 'a penny for the guy' - but these days they hope to get more than a penny.

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Literary Landscapes

Scholars see litarature as a history of styles and strucrure, influences and themes.

But for most English people, the history of their literature is something much vaguer. It is an impressionistic collage of places and personalities.

It begins with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a band of mediaeval pilgrims entartaining one another with stories as they travel on horseback from London to Canterbury.

... then Shakespeare in the Globe Theatre by the Thames, where he performed his plays for the boisterous tradesmen and the cultured gentry of Elizabethan London...

... the 18th Century poets reding their latest works to each other in the coffee houses of Covent Garden. And the great Dr. Johnson, who lived in Fleet Street.

The mind's eye sees Wordsworth striding accross the hills of the Lake District, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles on the horizon of the Dorset countryside.

But the strongest image of all is a solitary, windswept house on the desolate Yorkshire moors - the scene of Emily Bronte's haunting story of violence and passionate love, Wuthering Heights.

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The Great Fire of London

100,000 people were made homeless. St. Paul cathedral was gutted. Over 32,000 houses were destroyed. Four-fifths of the old walled City of London was wiped out in four days and four nights.

More than three hundred years later, the date is burned into the memories of all English people.

The Great fire of London began in a road called Pudding Lane, near London Bridge. The date was September 2, 1666. Miraculously, very few lives were lost. But scraps of burning material were blown as far as a hundred kilometres to Oxford in the west. The wind changed during the night of the 4th-5th and halted the destruction.

From that date on, the mediaevel character of London was Lost for ever. Architects became very conscious of the danger of fire. No more high, timber frame buildings were built. An Act of parliament specified that everything should now be of brick or stone. And the height of buildings was fixed according to the width of the street-four storeys in the main streets, ad only two storeys in narrow lanes.

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In Case of Fire

A gentleman came down from his hotel bedroom and asked the night porter for a glass of water.

He took it upstairs and reappeared moments later asking for another. The night porter was only too willing to oblige.

When the gentleman came down for the fifteenth time, the porter (a man of no mean intelligence) began to wonder what was going on.

'Hey, you must be very thirsty tonight,' he said by way of conversation. 'I'm not drinking it, actually,' said the gentleman. 'There's a fire in my bedroom.'

Would you know what to do if a fire broke out in your home ?

Close all doors and keep them shut, especially the door of the room where the fire is. The door will hold back the fire for as long as 20 minutes - long enough to get everyone out of the house.

Then call the fire-brigade.

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Fortnum and Mason

Knocking over a mountain of tinned peas with a supermarket trolley is one of the embrassing hazards of modern shopping.

But not Fortnum and Mason.

There are no trolleys in this Piccadilly grocer's shop. The floors are croved with thick red carpet and the assistans wear pin-stripe trousers and tail-coats. The display by the door is a pyramid, built with jars of Beluga caviar, selling at a hundred pounds a time.

Fortnums have been in business since 1707. And for nearly as long they have been grocers to the Royal Family.

The original Mr. Fortnum was a footman at the royal place - he was the one with the connections. The first Mr. Mason had a small shop up the road. They were an ideal combination. To this day their shop in London is famous for the quality of its food and the excellence of its service.

Pop stars rub shoulders with Dukes and diplomats. It's fine place for spotting famous faces, and a clam place to wander, after the bustle of Piccadilly. If you don't fancy the caviar, have a cake or two. There's a tea-room up some carpeted stairs at the back.

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Beanz Meanz Heinz

A few years ago the famous canned food company, Heinz (it rhymes with lines) covered the advertisement hoardings of Britain with the slogan Beanz Means Heinz.

It was a vivid illustration of how the letters 's' in beans and means is pronounced; but much more than that, a reminder of the quantity of beans that the British put on their forks every day.

The bean in question is the common 'peabean' or 'Navy-bean' (phaseolus vulgaris) and it is grown in Michigan USA. It is shipped over to England, baked and canned in a sweet tomato sauce.

The British buy two and a half million cans of beaked beans every day.

Millions of schoolchildren come home to meals of frozen fish fingers and beans, sausages and beans, ham and beans, scrambled egg and beans, beans on toast, or simply beans.

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Albert Able of Alberta

Hundreds of boring and repetitive jobs have been taken over by computers. They don't suffer from eye strain and they don't need holidays or sick leave. What's more they do exactly what you tell them to usually.

During the fifties Time Magazine had a computer to deal with their subscription renewals.

The computer was programmed to address and frank the renewal notices. It had on file the names and addresses of all the subscribers, and how much postage was required in each case.

Another machine was linked to the computer. It sorted all these letters into bundles by area.

No human was needed in this operation and the 300,000 letters (addresses, franked and sorted) were stacked in neat piles ready to be bundled into mail bags and taken to the post office.

Nobody realized anything was wrong until Mr. Albert Able of Alberta in Canada woke up one morning to find five postmen, each carrying three bulging mail bags, standing in front of his door. The computer had got stuck on the first record and sent every letter to him.

He completed one of the renewal forms, but asked for only one copy per week of Time magazine.

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Wedding Presents

If you are invited to a wedding in England, you send a present to happy couple. If you are not invited you don't - the custom is fairly logical.

Of course, if you think you should have been invited but weren't, you can always embarrass everybody by sending a handsome present anyway.

Close friends and family often give money. And as a rule, other guests give the bride and bridegroom something which will be usefull in their new home. (It is usually sent before the wedding day.)

The drawback to this is that a young couple can find themselves with half a dozen teapots, three sets of wine glasses, four bread boards and crystal fruit bowl - but no knives and forks.

A lot of engaged couples make a list of the things that they need. They don't send it out with the invitations. But if you want to avoid being the unwary giver of the twenty - fifth flower vase, it's a nice idea to ask for it.

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Gretna Green

If a sixteen-year old English girl's parents refused to let her marry, she used to have two options- either to obey them, or to run away to Gretna Green.

In Gretna Green she might be married by the blacksmith. Her beloved would place the ring on the anvil, and the blacksmith could pronounce them man and wife.

It is a village in the south -east of Scotland - just ten minutes walk from the English border.

Under Scottish law a person can be married without his parents' consent at the age of sixteen. Under English law he has to wait until he is eighten.

But nowadays there is no blackmith at Gretna Green and the marriages take place in the Registry Office. Young people are generally not in such a passionate hurry to get married either. Modern seciety allows them much more freedom.

But occasionally a bright-eyed young couple can still be seen clutching each other's hands as the train from the south pulls over the border.

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The Savoy

Statesmen go to Claridge's, businessmen stay at the Hilton. But actors and artists take rooms at The Savoy.

The savoy of London is the most famous hotel in the world. Winston Churchill used to eat there every week when he was in London. Johann Strauss once played waltzes in the restaurant. And the Prince of Wales-later King Edward VII dined there regulary on frogs legs his favourite dish.

The great Escoffier invented Peach Melba for the opera singer, Nellie Melba, while she was at the Savoy. And for the French actress, Sarah Bernhardt, he created Poularde Belle Helene.

The hotel was built by Richard D'Oyly Carte, the impresario behind Gilbert and Sullivan.

He had already built a theatre for their hugely successful comic operas.

When D'Oly Carte found that American hotels were so much better than anything in London, he decided to build the best hotel in the world. In 1889 he opened The Savoy.

It overlooks the Thames between the Houses of Parliament and Waterloo Bridge. And it still has its own theatre.

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