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44.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	AESTHETICS By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of aesthetic theory depends has become an obstruction to theory about them. For one reason: these works are products that exist externally and physically. In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience. Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favourable to understanding. In addition, the very perfection of some of these products, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions that get in the way of fresh insight. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life experience. When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which aesthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognised to constitute experience. Mountain peaks do not float unsupported, they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations. It is the business of those who are concerned with the theory of the earth, geographers and geologists, to make this fact evident in its various implications. The theorist who would deal philosophically with fine art has a like task to accomplish. If one is willing to grant this position, even if only by way of temporary experiment, one will see that there follows a conclusion which is at first sight surprising. In order to understand the meaning of artistic products, we have to forget them for a time, to turn aside from them and have recourse to the ordinary forces and conditions of experience that we do not usually regard as aesthetic. We must arrive at the theory of art by means of a detour. For theory is concerned with understanding and insight. It is, of course, quite possible to enjoy flowers in their coloured form and delicate fragrance without knowing anything about plants theoretically. But if one sets out to understand the flowering of plants, one is committed to finding out something about the interactions of soil, air, water and sunlight that condition the growth of plants. In order to understand the aesthetic in its ultimate and approved forms, one must begin with it in the raw, in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear, arousing one's interest and affording enjoyment as one looks and listens. Yet so extensive and subtly pervasive are the ideas that set art itself upon a remote pedestal that many people would be repelled rather than pleased if told that they enjoyed their casual recreations, in part at least, because of their aesthetic quality.The arts which today have most vitality for the average person are things he or she does not take to be arts: for instance, the movies, jazz, comic strips, and, too frequently, lurid newspaper accounts of the week's events. For, when what they know as art is relegated to the museum and gallery, the unconquerable impulse towards experiences enjoyable in themselves finds such outlet as the daily environment provides. Many people who protest against the museum conception of art still share the fallacy from which that conception springs. For the popular notion comes from a separation of art from the objects and scenes of ordinary experience that many theorists and critics pride themselves upon holding and even elaborating. The times when select and distinguished objects are closely connected with the products of usual vocations are the times when appreciation of the former is most rife and most keen.
45.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Goat Racing I was about to witness goat racing. Easter Monday in Buccoo Village. I was fighting my way through ice-cream vans, hordes of people, food stalls and hot music singeing my eardrums. Even though the general movement was towards the racecourse, I elbowed my way through the crowds in an effort to get a good pitch. An area had been cordoned off to make a course for competitors. Not quite on a par with established racecourses, but on the similar assumption that spectators were to line either side of a stretch of ground along which the participants would travel. An attempt was being made to keep a handful of select goats in order. No mean feat when dealing with an animal fabled to eat almost anything it can get hold of. Canoe Trip As the day drew to a close, I started to think about the night ahead, and I shuddered with fear. The canoe was too wet to sleep in, there was nowhere to stop, and we hadn't seen any villages or huts since early morning. In the dim moonlight, and with the aid of our torch we could just make out the line of the cliffs; the torch batteries were failing, so we put in new ones, but they didn't work. Obviously we weren't going to be able to spot a camping place. A couple of miles later, Lesley called out that she had seen a distant flickering light and our hopes soared: the light turned out to be moonlight glinting on waves, soon we could hear the roaring noise of fast-rushing water, though we couldn't see what was happening. Time stood still, and we moved on. How to be Presentation Perfect - we answer your questions I am not a natural at making presentations, yet in my role as managing director I am increasingly required to present infernally to my colleagues, not to mention externally to the major shareholders. How can I improve my presentational techniques and my confidence? You are not the only one. Making a presentation involves completely different skills from those you need to run a company, yet more and more senior executives are expected to be accomplished at it. If you are trying to convince your audience of something, you have to be convinced yourself. Demonstrate your conviction in the passion and enthusiasm you bring to the presentation. That means you must do your homework. Test your proposition carefully in advance. Ask colleagues to identify the 'hard questions' your audience might put to you. You also need to build a positive climate from the outset. Begin with an area of common ground that people can identify with and build gradually towards the conclusion you want to reach.
46.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Every Picture Tells a Story Adapting novels for film almost always involves a process of reduction, condensation and deletion. This can be very frustrating for the writer, but also illuminating. Working on a script, I was struck by how much of the dialogue and narrative description in a given scene in the novel I could dispense with, while still getting across the same point. This does not necessarily mean that the dialogue and description of the original were superfluous. It is a matter of the type of attention demanded of the audience by narrative in each medium, and a matter of the type of redundancy each employs. I do not mean 'redundancy' in the usual colloquial sense of material which is unnecessary, but in a technical sense. In a novel, such redundancy would include the repeated allusion to certain traits by which characters are identified, as well as speech tags such as 'he said'. Strictly speaking a character trait needs to be described only once, but it assists comprehension if we are constantly reminded of it. And usually we can infer who is speaking in a scene of dialogue from the content and layout on the page, but speech tags make reading easier. Stage drama, which consists mostly of speech, imitates and reproduces the redundancy of real speech with various degrees of stylisation. In some modern dramas, this is taken to an extreme, so that the dialogue seems to consist almost entirely of redundant language, whose function is purely phatic (merely establishing contact between the two speakers), leaving us in the dark as to what is being communicated. Watching Movies Watching movies, one can be carried away to the degree that one feels part of the world of the moving picture. It is an experience that lifts one out of oneself into a world where one is not beholden to ordinary reality, at least for the length of the film. So it seems that what one feels and does while at the movies does not really count. But as soon as the lights are turned on, the spell is abruptly broken, one is again in the ordinary world. One does not feel responsible for the time spent under the spell of the film and, further, this unreality prevents one from devoting much serious attention to what was considered in my boyhood not an art, but 'mere entertainment'. This was how some people of our parents' generation, and most of our teachers, disparaged the movies. Like most people, they liked to be entertained, but they did not consider the movies to be an art. The film studios The site of the Leiper Film Company studios was a huddle of many disparate buildings. The topography of the place was irrational and obscure. It possessed, certainly, a few permanent landmarks such as the Script Department, out for the rest it appeared to be made up of numerous small rooms, identically furnished, which were employed for official and unofficial confabulations and could be distinguished one from another only by a surrealist system of digits and letters of the alphabet, and to locate any particular one of these unaided was a considerable enterprise. More than anything else, perhaps, the studio lacked a focus. A decisive single main entrance might have provided this, but in fact there were three main entrances, severely egalitarian in their amenities and with nothing to choose between them except that one of them gave access to the place where you wanted to arrive and the other two did not; and in none of them was there anywhere where enquiries could be made and some species of orientation established. To the mere stranger it was all vastly confusing. Mere strangers, however, were few and far between; for obvious reasons, the organisation did not encourage their presence. And it was to be presumed that people who worked there could find their way about all right. And by these employees' united labours, romance and adventure would travel the country. Hand in hand, head against shoulder, Jane and George, Sally and Dick would, for three hours at least, snatch immunity, by the studio's contriving, from domestic contention and public strife, from tedium and malice and routine, and the struggle to keep alive. Film-makers Almost everybody, it seems, wants to make a movie. Bookshops fill shelves with 'how-to' books about scriptwriting and film production. Fashionable universities offer courses. There are competitions offering the kind of hand-held camera that Robert Rodriguez used to make the film El Mariachi, which cost $7,000 to make and shot him from nowhere into the front line of American independent directors. If ever dreams came true, they did for Rodriguez - and ahead of schedule. Recalling his 23rd birthday in his book about his Mariachi adventures, he writes: "Orson Welles made Citizen Kane when he was 25. Spielberg made Laws at 26. So I've only got two or three years to make my breakthrough film.' This was not always so. When the studios ruled, film-makers were expected to take time to mature. They worked behind the scenes, as editors, writers or cinematographers. They learnt the job directing low-budget Westerns or supporting short films. John Huston was 35 when he made his first film, The Maltese Falcon. Fred Zinnemann, the director of High Noon, only got into his stride in his forties. But nowadays, without the support system of studios or television, aspiring film-makers are forced to be mavericks.
47.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The Wrong Country Uncle chose for them a package holiday at a very reasonable price: a flight from Gatwick Airport, twelve nights in Venice, the fairyland city, in the Pensione Concordia. When Keith and Dawne went together to the travel agency to make the booking, the counter clerk explained that the other members of that particular package were a school group from the south coast, all of them learning Italian. But something went wrong. Either in the travel agency or at the check-in desk, or in some anonymous computer, a small calamity was conceived. Dawne and Keith ended up in a hotel called the Edelweiss, in Room 212, somewhere in Switzerland. At Gatwick they had handed their tickets to a girl in the yellow-and-red Your-Kind-of-Holiday uniform. She'd addressed them by name, had checked the details on their tickets and said that that was lovely. An hour later it had surprised them to hear elderly people on the plane talking in North of England accents. Keith said there must have been a cancellation, or possibly the Italian class was on a second plane. They ordered two drinks, and then two more. 'The coach'll take us on,' a stout woman with spectacles announced when they touched down. 'Keep all together now.' There's been no mention of an overnight stop in the brochure, but when the coach drew in at its destination, Keith explained that that was clearly what this was. As they stepped out of the coach it was close on midnight: fatigued and travel-stained, they did not feel like questioning their right to the beds they were offered. But the next morning, when it became apparent that they were being offered them for the duration of their holiday, they became alarmed. 'We have the lake, and the water birds,' the receptionist smilingly explained. 'And we may take the steamer to Interlaken.' 'An error has been made,' Keith informed the man, keeping the register of his voice even, for it was essential to be calm. He was aware of his wive's agitated breathing close beside him. 'We were meant to be in Venice. In the Pensione Concordia.' 'I do not know the name, sir. This is Switzerland.' 'A coach is to take us on. An official said so on the plane. She was here last night, that woman.' 'Your group is booked twelve nights in the Edelweiss Hotel. To make an alteration now, sir, if you have changed your minds -' 'We haven't changed our minds. Theres been a mistake.' The receptionist shook his head. He did not know about a mistake. 'The man who made the booking,' Dawne interrupted, 'was bald, with glasses and a moustache.' She gave the name of the travel agency in London. 'Some problem, have we?' a woman said, beaming at Keith. She was the stout woman he had referred to as an official. They'd seen her talking to the yellow-and-red girl at Gatwick. On the plane she'd walked up and down the aisle, smiling at people. 'My name is Franks,' she was saying now. 'I'm married to the man with the bad leg.' 'Are you in charge, Mrs Franks?' Dawne enquired. 'Only we're in the wrong hotel.' Again she gave the name of the travel agency and described the bald-headed counter clerk, mentioning his spectacles and his moustache. Keith interrupted her. 'It seems we got into the wrong group. We reported to the Your-Kind-of-Holiday girl and left it all to her.' 'We should have known when they weren't from Dover,' Dawne contributed. 'We heard them talking about Darlington.' Keith made an impatient sound. He wished sh'ed leave the talking to him. 'We noticed you at Gatwick,' Keith said. 'We knew you were in charge of things.' 'And I noticed you. I counted you, although I daresay you didn't see me doing that. Now, let me explain to you. There are many places Your-Kind-of-Holiday sends its clients to, many different holidays at different prices. There are, for instance, villa holidays for the adventurous under-thirty-fives. There are treks to Turkey, and treks for singles to the Himalayas.' 'Now, what I am endeavouring to say to you good people is that all tickets and labels are naturally similar, the yellow with the two red bands.' Mrs Franks suddenly laughed. 'So if you simply followed other people with the yellow-and-red label you might imagine you could end up in a wildlife park! But of course,' she added soothingly, 'that couldn't happen in a million years.' 'We're not meant to be in Switzerland,' Keith doggedly persisted. 'Well, let's just see, shall we?' Unexpectediy, Mrs Franks turned and went away, leaving them standing. The receptionist was no longer behind the reception desk. The sound of typing could be heard. 'She seems quite kind,' Dawne whispered, 'that woman.' Keith wasn't listening. He tried to go over in his mind every single thing that had occurred: handing the girl the tickets, sitting down to wait, and then the girl leading the way to the plane, and then the pilot's voice welcoming them aboard, and the air hostess with the smooth black hair going round to see that everyone's seat belt was fastened. 'Nice to have some young people along,' an elderly man's voice interrupted Keith's thoughts. 'Nottage the name is.' The old man's wife was with him, both of them looking as if they were in their eighties. They'd slept like logs, she said, best night's sleep they'd had for years, which of course would be due to the lakeside air. 'Thats nice,' Dawne said. Keith walked out of the reception area and Dawne followed him. On the forecourt of the hotel they didn't say to one another that there was an irony in the catastrophe that had occurred. On their first holiday since their honeymoon they'd landed themselves in a package tour of elderly people when the whole point of the holiday was to escape the needs and demands of the elderly. In his bossy way Uncle had said so himself when they'd tried to persuade him to accompany them.
48.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	HE WAS A PEOPLE PERSON American executives are adopting the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton as a model of good management. Eluned Price reports. Most people in Britain know who Sir Ernest Shackleton was and have a rough idea of what he did. America, however, has only just discovered him - although the Wall Street Journal's description of Shackleton earlier this year as 'an Antarctic explorer whose beats went all but unnoticed for most of the 20th century' is taking things too far. But now the Americans are making up for lost time with powerful enthusiasm. Biographies and accounts of the voyage of the Endurance are in production and are expected to spring off the shells as fast as they are stacked; the American Museum of Natural History is mounting a grand exhibition, and Columbia Tristar is preparing a film based on Shackleton's life. Some American managers have also adopted Shackleton as icon and exemplar. His sell-appointed apostles recount the details of his deeds with awe; they extract lessons in leadership and communications as parables for spin doctors, and insiders refer to each other as 'speaking Shackleton'. The determined, resourceful Shackleton, with his reindeer sleeping bag (fur inside) and blubber-stove has become a model for modern management consultants. Jim MacGregor, the managing partner of Abernathy MacGregor Frank in New York, took Shackleton for a role model years ago. His firm specialises in 'communication aspects of mergers and acquisitions and corporate crises'. Such as? Such as 'this firm's plant blew up' or 'half the workforce has to go'. While not forgetting that Shackleton served time in public relations for a Glasgow steel works, it may be a trifle difficult to spot instantly the relevance of eking out the last bit of albatross in sub-zero temperatures to putting a spin on a derivatives trading disaster for the Internet. 'Even if a company manages its crises beautifully, it can still do a lot of harm by communicating sadly about what it's doing,' says MacGregor. 'Shackleton is a model for management because of his qualities as a leader and communicator. He had his values in order. he was at his best when he and those dependent on him had a great deal to lose -- such as their lives. In some ways the most fascinating decision Shackleton made was to turn back when only 97 miles from the South Pole. That trip explained his credibility for the next one: the lives of his men were paramount.' This refers to Shackleton's expedition to reach the South Pole in 1908 when, 97 miles short of their objective, with unforeseen delays draining their supplies and limited time to get back to their ship, Shackleton made the courageous and difficult decision to turn hack. In a crisis, says MacGregor, people want to know someone is in charge. Whereas now the tendency is for managers to duck and squirm, Shackleton was prepared to stand up and accept responsibility. His 1914 expedition was the one that became the stuff of legend. His ship, the Endurance, drifted for nine months in the pack ice and was finally crushed by ice floes. When it finally went down, Shackleton told his men, 'we should all eventually reach safety provided that you continue to do your utmost and to trust me'. From all the accounts and diaries the then kept, it is clear that there was never a time that the Boss was not in charge. 'Shackleton thought everything through, planned for every eventuality, kept his men continually informed and sought their opinions,' says MacGregor. 'He was adaptable, willing to let go when something was lost and start afresh. We've built an effective set of principles here that Shackleton illustrates. Clients can relate to his story without feeling thry're being criticised.' Shackleton believed that an explorer needs optimism, physical endurance and patience. 'One of the hardest things to do in desperate straits is notating, especially in America, a culture that is fanatically opposed to letting time sort things out,' says MacGregor. 'If you buy bonds and guess wrong on the interest rates, you hang in there and eventually you'll get your money back. To "fix it" and sell up would mean a huge loss. Equally, don't be afraid to change your plans if they're not working. If a new product's a stinker, don't keep selling it.' Shackleton led by example. On the voyage back from the Endurance, he noticed Hurley, the expedition photographer, gloveless. He forced his own on Hurley, saying if he didn't put them on he would throw them overboard. Someone else remembered him doing the same thing with a biscuit when they were near starving on the 1905 expeditions: 'He said he'd leave it in the snow. Millions of pounds couldn't have bought that biscuit.' As Caroline Alexander, author of Endurance, the human account of that expedition, says: 'The public appetite for heroic endeavour is increasing. Shackleton exposes the fact that there is nothing heroic going on now. Everything else falls away and he is left standing, the genuine embodiment of the ideals that we are so wistful for nowadays.'
49.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Fashion Fashion is often seen as a modern phenomenon, entirely dependent upon nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism for its development. Most historians of fashion are at pains to point out, though, that fashion, at least in the sense of style and design, has a very long history. They often take the rise of the market and mercantile trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as their starting point. As societies have developed in complexity, populations have expanded, and multiple technologies for producing an increasing variety of clothing and physical adornment have been discovered, so the meanings attached to dress have also increased in their complexity and significance. Consequently, it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty today what any item of clothing or adornment actually means. For example, a man's suit, supposedly an indicator of the most extreme uniformity, actually conveys very differing meanings in different contexts and to different people. Writer Newspaper reports of publishers in bidding wars over whizz-kid manuscripts have resulted in a skewed idea of what life is like for your average novelist. Down at my end of the business - i.e. not exactly topping the best-seller lists - there are two ways of making ends meet. The wisest among us write in the evenings and have other full-time jobs that will still be there even if the book doesn't immediately get snapped up and turned into a film. Those such as myself, however, are literary odd-jobbers, subsisting on a bit of teaching, the occasional workshop and articles like this. I have heard tell of an in-house writing opportunity offered by a chocolate factory, but I've never managed to get anything like that. Somehow, though, by dint of juggling part-time jobs and credit cards and also, more often than not, thanks to the generosity of those names you find in Acknowledgements, the novel gets written. Sudden Fame The small venues we were performing at around the country were all beginning to sell out and extra bouncers were having to be called in to hold back the growing legion of screaming girls. We found ourselves having to use secret entrances to the village halls and ballrooms we were playing to prevent ourselves being mobbed by fans. On the few nights a week when we were not working, we found it difficult to leave the house without being pursued through the streets by adoring followers. In a matter of days, we had been transformed into celebrities. Our moves were monitored by our admirers and all of our needs catered for by our management and other interested parties. Even though the shyness that had always accompanied me never quite went away, it was replaced by a strange naive over-confidence that only naturally shy people who have been thrust into similar situations can relate to. In short, I was emotionally totally out of my depth.
5.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Language You and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability, we can shape events in each others brains with exquisite precision. Language is so tightly woven into human experience that it is scarcely possible to imagine life without it. Chances are that if you find two or more people together anywhere on earth, they will soon be exchanging words. When there is no one to talk with, people talk to themselves, to their dogs, even to their plants. I like to describe the skill of language as an 'instinct'. This conveys the idea that people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs. Web-spinning was not invented by some unsung spider genius, and does not depend on having had the right education or on having an aptitude for architecture or the construction trades. Climate and Weather Climate and weather, which are mainly created by the air around us, profoundly affect the lives and distribution of animals and plants. Climate can be a dominating force on the character of landscapes. For example, warmth and wetness all the year round allow the growth of tropical jungles, which are natural treasure troves, with an incredible diversity of species. Conversely cold, windswept areas can muster only a scattered selection of living things. The daily weather patterns that add up in the long term to the climate are caused by great masses of air rising and mixing, for the atmosphere is never still. Some of the motion is due to the fact that the envelope of gases rests on a spinning globe, because air is thin it is not dragged along at the same speed as the earth, but tends to lag behind. A more important source of turbulence, or air movement, however, is the sun. Coffee My duties as bar-person included serving drinks but, more worryingly, I was to be responsible for making coffee. In Lygon Street, Melbourne, a restaurant can stand or fall on its coffee reputation. There followed several days of intensive coffee-making training, in which I took in more than I could ever wish to know about the cleaning and maintenance of the restaurants gleaming espresso machine. I learnt, too, about the essential principles involved in making the perfect cup of rich, frothy cappuccino. By the end of the first week I had to admit that making a decent cup of coffee was not as easy as it looked and I fully expected to be banished to lowly ash-tray wiping duties again. Luckily, my boss was a patient man. 'Making coffee is both an art and a science,' he said, 'and you need time to acquire the knack.'
50.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Kinetic Art Rejoice -- the well-nigh impossible has happened: London's austere Hayward Gallery has been transformed into a place full of wonder. And not, thankfully, by some huge-budget, mega-hyped, multi-media extravaganza, but by a charmingly idiosyncratic investigation into an almost forgotten aspect of the last 60 years. A new exhibition traces the history of kinetic art -- that is art which is concerned with movement -- in the twentieth century. In the process, it reveals that making artworks which either move by themselves or investigate the idea of movement in some way has been a consistent if largely unrecognised theme of some of the most fascinating creative activity of this century. And not only that -- the marvellous range of paintings and drawings, documents and films on kinetic art assembled by curator Guy Brett, who has made a life-long study of the subject, are presented largely unmediated by text. Visitors, unharried by explanations, are left to have the pleasure of making connections and discoveries for themselves. David Hockney Hockney's work appeals to a great many people who might otherwise display little interest in art. It may be that they are attracted to it because it is figurative and, therefore, easily accessible on one level, or because the subject matter of leisure and exorcism provides an escape from the mundanities of everyday life. Perhaps it is not even the art that interests some people, but Hockney's engaging personality and the verbal wit that makes him such good copy for the newspapers. He may, in other words, be popular for the wrong reasons. But does this negate the possibility that his art has a serious sense of purpose? In the view of some respected critics, Hockney is nothing more than an overrated minor artist. To this one can counter that Hockney might seem minor because it is unacceptable today to be so popular, rather than because his work is lacking in substance. Hockney himself is not self-deluding; he is aware of his limitations and thinks that it is beside the point to dismiss his work because it does not measure up to an abstract concept of greatness. Hockney does not claim to be a great artist and is aware that only posterity can form a final judgement on his stature. Window-shopping - an art exhibition In the last few years I have seen loads of exhibitions of contemporary art, and amongst them brilliance and mediocrity. What always bugs me, though, are shows that seem to push an underlying agenda, suggesting there is a common attitude among certain artists. Sometimes it works, we really are made aware of new trends mining though apparently unrelated work. More often, though, we are alerted to a dubious angle or a forced concept. This led me, as a curator, to attempt a show which stands as an antithesis to this. Together with seven artists I took over a space in an empty warehouse. 'Window-shopping' was intended as a collection of individual artworks that related to each other purely through the fact that they proclaimed to be art. Sam Cole's knitted cats went barmy chasing each other round on a toy train track. In contrast Matthew Crawley's turning on a video camera, opening it up and poking around in there until it breaks flickered, flashed and disappeared on the monitor in the corner. These works certainly didn't fit into the 'an exhibition exploring the theme of ...' category, and wouldn't usually be seen together in the same show, but why not? They did not impede each other and actually, I hope, through their contrast, gave something to each other. OK, so I haven't made any grandiose statements about the nature of contemporary art practice, but there probably aren't any to be made about what is basically an individual activity in which artists set their own parameters. Art History People who enjoy paintings are sometimes reluctant to analyse them for fear of spoiling the richness and spontaneity of their experience. It has been suggested that some of the work done by art historians, whose concern is with theory rather than practice, ignores and indeed denies the aesthetic experience, the fundamental pleasure of looking, as well as the very special act of artistic creativity. This view is a bit like the notion that knowing the ingredients of the recipe, recognising the method of cooking and seeing the utensils employed detracts from the taste of the dish. Acknowledging the importance of enjoying something does not, of course, preclude a thorough knowledge of the object that is arousing pleasure. It might in fact be more pleasurable if we know more about the object we are viewing. Moreover, pleasure is not a simple matter. The arousal of our senses - and how we recognise and register it - is itself open to interrogation. It is also historically located. Why we like particular characteristics of certain sorts of objects at any one time is not simply the result of our genes or our own particular personalities but is determined by values promoted within the society of which we are a part. So, while no one seeks to underestimate the importance of sensuous and instinctive responses to art objects, the notion that the sensuous is undermined by the intellectual is a legacy from a period in the past which promoted art as an alternative to thought.
51.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	REMOVAL DAY With her children now grown, widowed Susan faces leaving the family home. The van said, Susan noticed, 'Removers of Distinction', and indeed, every distinguishing feature of the house was being removed. Everything which made it particular was being wrapped in newspaper and packed in boxes by Fred the removal man, his enormous fingers like sausages tenderly handling all the breakables, and his team of helpers, not so gentle. It was a lovely house that she was leaving, an elegant four-storeyed building overlooking a tiny harbour. The years she had spent there, the years of the children growing up and leaving, hung around in the air, faintly present like agitated dust. When told that they had bought this house, Robert, then five, had asked thoughtfully, 'Mum, when you buy a house, how d'you get it home?' You could miss a little boy in the physical presence of the adult he had become; Robert was here, helping, and in particular making sure she didn't let on about the piano. Francesca was here too, also helping, in her bossy way, stubbornly certain that nobody but she, the family daughter, would be careful enough over a fine instrument like a Steinway piano. 'She doesn't look like she's going to cry on us,' observed Fred. 'That's something.' 'Do people cry?' Susan asked, intrigued. 'You'd be surprised,' said Fred. 'They go around merry as magpies helping out till its all in the van, then you look round and there they are, crying in the middle of an empty room. They're fine when we get to the new place, mind. It's just seeing everything taken apart that upsets them.' She could easily imagine. Left to herself, Susan would have warned the removers about the piano before accepting the estimate. Robert had said sternly that it was their business to see the problem, and their bad luck if they didn't. The piano now stood in solitary glory in the upstairs sitting room, the best room in the house. They would leave it till last, naturally. Sitting on the bottom stair, for all the chairs were gone now, she remembered the time they had arrived. The day she was living through now was like that day filmed and run backwards - the piano had been carried in first. And it had got stuck on the stairs. For nearly two hours the team of removal men struggled manfully with it, until it seemed they would simply have to give up. They brought it up to the turn of the stairs, and down again, and cut out banister rails, and got it jammed anyway, while little Robert looked on enthralled, and young Francesca wailed, 'We can't live in a house without a piano! We can't! I'd rather die!' And of course they couldn't, not with a musical daughter destined to be a concert pianist. They had to find a way to get it in, and a way had been found. Peter, her late husband, had come home to the crisis and had resolved it. The piano had been left in the garden while the other furniture was brought in - there was much less of it then, they had been relatively young and hard up. And next day, to everyone's surprise, a builder had been engaged to take out the first floor window. Then, from the quay below the house, where fish were unloaded from the inshore boats, a little crane was borrowed, and dragged up the hill by means of the local farmer's tractor. Finally, the piano was wrapped in blankets, hooked to the crane and gently swung safely through the gaping window, while the entranced children danced with joy at the sight of it. However, the whole process had cost so much it was months before they could afford to have the piano professionally tuned. 'That's that,' Peter had said. 'That's there for ever.' But for ever is a long time. The children were increasingly too busy to come home at weekends, and Susan was no longer so mobile in the house, and puffing as she climbed the stairs. The thought of the stairs interrupted her daydream. The banister rails were still not quite parallel, they had not been put back perfectly all that time ago. She ought to have warned the removers, surely she ought. But now it was too late. Any moment now they would find it. She looked around, dazed and panic-stricken. 'Are you all right, love?' Fred was saying. 'Mind yourself, it's just the piano to come now, and then we'll be on our way.' She moved from the bottom stair, heart beating. Robert and Francesca had both appeared, standing in the back of the hallway to watch. 'No tears then?' Fred said, conversationally. Truth to tell she was just on the edge of them. How odd that simply moving things made them matter. Chairs and cups and things, hundreds of things, that one never noticed or gave a moment's thought to while they stayed put, now they were displaced, were full of pathos, crying out to be cared about - and she would have cried, in a moment, surely she would. Only just then the piano appeared, lurching at the top of the stairs, with Fred backing down in front of it and one of the others behind. It tipped slightly. 'Easy does it!' cried Fred, and they carried smoothly down the stairs and out of the front door, and put it down behind the removal van on the road. It was Robert who laughed first, but then they couldn't stop laughing, relieved that it was all over. All three of them, helplessly, leaning against each other, gasping for breath and laughing more. 'What's the joke, then?' asked Fred, but he merely started them off again. So that, as they went, the three of them, arm in arm down the path for the last time, the only tears she shed were tears of laughter.
52.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Love them, fear them, worship them, human culture has always had a lot to say about birds. But what does that say about us? Paul Evans reports There's a bump, bump, bump coming from the greenhouse as a little brown shuttlecock bounces against the glass. It turns out to be a wren: an ominous bird, a bird of portent, augury and divination. Is it spelling out some sort of message from a world at the very edges of my imagination? Or is it just a poor bird stuck in a greenhouse? Depending on your point of view, both could be true. Wrens have been flitting through the undergrowth of British culture ever since it began. In medieval times, a complicated system of observing the directions in which wrens flew determined the sort of luck the observer would experience. In modern times, the image of the wren remains in pictures and ceramics in many British households. Even though the early beliefs may have been watered down or even forgotten, the wren still has a perch in our consciousness and a nest in our affections. A wood without wrens is a sad, impoverished place. This is almost certainly because there is a rich vein of folklore running through our relationships with many birds which reaches back to a time when people read the world around them differently. Where people are, necessarily, hitched more directly to natural processes for their very survival, they develop an ecological and cultural language through which the significance of other creatures is communicated. This significance is, of course, prone to cultural shifts that cause major image changes for the creatures involved. A good example of this is the red kite. During the early sixteenth century, foreign visitors to London were amazed to see red kites swooping down to take bread from the hands of children. These birds were protected and valued urban scavengers. But it was not long before they began to be seen as vermin, and as a result were soon wiped out in most areas apart from Wales. Gradually red kites began to assume a romantic personality linked to this Celtic stronghold and they have now become totemic birds of British conservation, protected again and reintroduced with a view to helping them regain their original distribution. Our relationship with other creatures is more than cultural and goes way back to the evolution of human nature. Though the first human birdwatchers may have been acutely observant of bird behaviour because it announced approaching predators, bad weather and the availability of food, and also offered a supernatural link to the world of their dreams, there is more to it. When we ask why birds are so important to us, we are also asking what it is to be us. Flight, song, freedom - our fascination, envy and emulation of the avian world is surely a measure of our own identity against that of the wildness of nature. Some might dismiss these feelings as vestigial attachments, useful to us in an earlier phase of our evolution, irrelevant now. But, like the appendix and wisdom teeth, they're still very much part of us and losing them is traumatic. That is probably why, in recent years, birds have become the barometers of environmental change, indicators of ecological quality: the warning bells of environmentalism. Conservationists in Britain cite the endangering of 30 species, a figure that is depressing not only because it spells out the loss of feathered curiosities, but because it is a massive cultural loss too.These birds carry a huge amount of cultural baggage. For example, the skylark, turtle dove and lapwing signify spiritual love, romantic love and magic. Anyone who has read Shelley's poems, Shakespeare's sonnets and Robert Graves's The White Goddess will feel more than a tug of remorse at the loss of these once commonplace birds. Yet while the loss of these birds is lamented, the loss of others which don't figure in either literature or folklore is virtually ignored. Folklore is so important. The stories, legends and rhymes which persist through time, with their obscure origins, constant revisions and reinventions, somehow have a greater living bond with their subjects than cold, scientific terms a bond that is strengthened by the everyday language in which they are understood and communicated. This gives them a power to summon up feelings and attitudes from a consciousness buried under all the stuff of modern life. Whether we watch wildlife films on TV or birdtables in the backyard, what were doing and the excitement we get from what we see cannot adequately be captured by scientific reason. Birds are engaging in ways we still find hard to fathom, let alone articulate, and so the stories we tell about them seem like ways of interpreting what birds are telling us. The wren in the greenhouse weaves an intricate knot, tying an imaginary thread between the here and now and a deep, distant history, holding the free end in its song and escaping into the future - a riddle that keeps me guessing.
53.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Citizen Kane When the film Citizen Kane finally appeared in 1941, despite the brouhaha that attended its release - delayed because of distributor's fears of the harm William Randolph Hearst, its alleged subject, might do to them - and largely ecstatic reviews, it was not a commercial success. It was television that brought it back to the public consciousness. It is perhaps the one film, above all others, that has inspired people to become film-makers. This is all the more astonishing since it was Orson Welles's first film. Welles always maintained that its success arose from his having no idea of what he was or wasn't allowed to do: he just went ahead and did it. But he had an extraordinary team at his disposal, cameraman Gregg Toland, screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, and the special-effects wizard Linwood Dunn. When Welles and Mankiewicz hit on the idea of portraying a newspaper magnate who both was and wasn't Hearst, Welles realised that he had found a perfect vehicle for himself both as director and actor, and seized his chance with the energy of a whirlwind. Dermot and Carmel Dermot thought that Carmel was rather odd that morning. Twice he had said that he might be late and not to worry if he dropped into the golf club on the way home. He had to have a natter with someone and that was the best place to have it. Twice she had nodded her head amiably and distantly as if she hadn't really heard or understood. 'Will you be all right? What are you going to do today?' he had asked. She had smiled. 'Funny you should ask that. I was just thinking that I hadn't anything to do all day so I was going to stroll down town and look at the shops. I was thinking that it was almost a sinful thing, just idling away the day.' Dermot had smiled back. 'You're entitled to enjoy yourself. And as I said, if I"m late I won't want anything to eat. So don't go to any trouble.' 'No, that's fine.' she said. Title Race Tea boy? Do you mind, I'm a mobile lukewarm beverage resource facilitator Human nature provides the most divine of comedies. Witness a recent study which has informed the nation that job titles are a prime cause of envy and unrest at work. A survey by a leading firm of recruitment consultants found that 90% of employers and 70% of employees admit that titles create divisions among colleagues. Most shockingly, the survey found that 70% of office workers would be willing to forgo a pay rise in favour of a more 'motivational' or 'professional' job title. If our vanity is reaching such proportions that even basic greed is being overwhelmed, we are indeed in dire straits. The truth is that in these brave new days of the early twenty-first century, nobody is content to be labelled subordinate. The titles under discussion place the emphasis on ability (specialist, coordinator) but are, in fact, little more than euphemisms.
54.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Writing by hand and on screen Dr Johnson maintained that 'what is written without effort is in general read without pleasure'. The converse is that good writing comes hard. Looking back though my handwritten school essays I was surprised at how few crossings-out they contained. Today I would have rewritten them five times over. I am sure the reason was that they were physically hard to write. The slowness of the hand disciplined the brain. What would be difficult to alter or erase was written with care. The casual facility of the computer leads to sloppiness. Most writers using word processors find the time spent correcting early drafts more or less equates with the time originally spent on handwritten text. Equally, the e-mail, unlike the handwritten letter, is emotionally ponderous. This electronic Eros is said to have revive the art of the love letter. Millions of these missives now flow down the lines, where previously there was only idle chatter. Hurrah for that. At least these e-mails are written, in a sort of English and a sort of grammar: But words printed on a screen pack a monotonous punch. Their writers are often unaccustomed to the power of the written word and tend, in computer jargon, to 'flare'. Their meaning becomes exaggerated and distorted in transmission. And printed words written in haste lack the care and character of handwriting. The CD I put down my cup and went to inspect the CD. The case was disappointing but the rainbow-silver disc inside looked interesting. 'Wonderful little things, aren't they?' Mr Warriston said, coming back into the room. I agreed, gingerly handing the disc to him. 'Amazing they manage to squeeze seventy minutes of music onto them,' he continued, bending to the hi-fi device. He switched it on and all sorts of lights came on. He pressed a button and a little drawer slid out of the machine. He put the disc inside, pressed the button again and the tray glided back in again. 'Of course, some people say they sound sterile, but I think they...' 'Do you have to turn them over, like records?' I asked. 'What? No,' Mr Warriston said, straightening. 'No, you only play one side.' 'Why?' I asked him. He looked nonplussed, and then thoughtful. 'You know,' he said, 'I've no idea. I don't see why you couldn't make both sides playable and double the capacity...' He stared down at the machine. 'You could have two lasers, or just turn it over by hand... hmm.' He smiled at me. 'Yes, good point.' He nodded over at my wooden chair. 'Anyway. Come on, let's get you sitting in the best place for the stereo effect, eh?' I smiled, pleased to have thought of a technical question Mr Warriston could not answer. Books versus Electronic Text In comparing books and electronic text, the author Malcolm Bradbury was spot on when he said that if matches had been invented after cigarette lighters, we'd have marvelled at the improvement. Most of the propaganda, dazzled by newness, states that electronic text is a change comparable to the invention of printing and that it is already nearly completed. It ignores the fact that shifts in consciousness take generations and such rhetoric falls into the trap of chronocentricity, the egotism that one's own generation sits on the very cusp of history. Take this treasure from Mighty Micro, a book from 1979: 'The 1980s will see the book as we know it, and as our ancestors created and cherished it, begin a slow and steady slide to oblivion.' So far, so wrong. Reading anything lengthy on a screen is such a miserable experience that most never do it and, in any case, the organisation of what resides in computers encourages people to dip into text. Techno-proselytisers have extracted virtue here by claiming that inherent flightiness leads to new forms of narrative and imaginative space. But there's nothing new about 'non-linearity'. Lots of books have never been read from beginning to end - most religious texts, dictionaries and poetry collections spring to mind. What is new is not so much the branchings of electronic text as that computers don't invite the joined-up thinking of reading anything in its entirety. The Office Charles Walked through the office door and into a perfect world of order. The carpet was clear of the paper avalanche which had buried it on the very day it was put down, and the naked desk was dark wood, just as he remembered it from the Sotheby's auction of five weeks ago. Neat file-holders were being put in their proper drawers. Twelve years of trade journals now filled the shelves on one wall. Kathleen strained to close the door of the filing cabinet and then turned on him. 'You have to go to computers, Charles. This is just too much.' 'Hello, Kathleen. Oh, this is amazing.' He was admiring the room, its antique furniture. He was not visualising a computer or any other mechanical device in it, not even a pencil sharpener. 'Simply amazing,' he said, altogether skirting the issue of computers. Over the two years he had known her, they'd had this conversation many times. She could never understand his resistance to the technology when he was so adept at computers and had even published an important paper on computer-mode giftedness. She had been the inspiration for that paper. Via the keyboard, she could dip her fingers into the stuffing of any software and make it into a new animal that could sit up and bark at the moon if she wished.
55.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The Vienna Assignment I was in Vienna to take photographs. That was generally the reason I was anywhere then. Photographs were more than my livelihood. They were part of my life. The way light fell on a surface never failed to tug at my imagination. The way one picture, a single snapshot, could capture the essence of a time and place, a city, a human being, was embedded in my consciousness. One day, one second, I might close the shutter on the perfect photograph. There was always the chance, so long as there was film in my camera. Finish one, load another, and keep looking, with eyes wide open. That was my code. Had been for a long time. I'd come close once, when some weird aptness in the knotted shape of a smoke plume from a burning oil well made my picture the one newspapers and magazines all over the world suddenly wanted. Brief glory from an even briefer moment. Just luck, really. But they say you make your own - the bad as well as the good. I went freelance after that, which should have been a clever move and would probably have worked out that way, but for life beyond the lens taking a few wrong turnings. The mid-nineties weren't quite the string of triumphs I'd foreseen when my defining image made it to the cover of Time magazine. That's why I was in Vienna, rather than anywhere even faintly newsworthy. But, still, I was taking photographs. And I was being paid to do it. It didn't sound bad to me. The assignment was actually a piece of happenstance. I'd done the London shots for a glossy coffee-table picture book: Four Cities in Four Seasons - London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, a European co-publishing venture that netted me a juicy commission to hang round moody locations in my home city in spring, summer, autumn, and winter. I'd given my own particular slant to daffodils in Hyde Park and heat haze and traffic fumes in Piccadilly. I'd also reconciled myself to the best and truest of what I'd delivered being tossed aside. It was, after all, only a picture book. It wasn't meant to challenge anyone's preconceptions or make them see instead of look. It was just after an obliging cold snap over Christmas and New Year that I handed in my London-in-winter batch and got the message that the Austrian photographer, Rudi Schussner, had walked out on the job in Vienna for reasons nobody seemed to think I needed to know about. Rather than call in someone new, they offered me the substitute's role. The Austrian publishers had liked what they'd seen of my stuff, apparently. Besides, I was free, whereas the French and Italian photographers weren't. And I was glad to go. Things at home weren't great. They were a long way short of that. A week snapping snowy Vienna didn't have to be dressed up as a compliment to my artistry for me to go like a shot. They put me up at the Europa, on Neuer Markt, in the heart of the old city. I'd last been to Vienna for a long weekend with my wife: a midsummer tourist scramble round just about every palace and museum in the joint. It had been hot, hectic and none too memorable. I hadn't even taken many photographs. On my own, in a cold hard January, it was going to be different, though. I knew that the moment I climbed off the shuttle bus from the airport and let my eyes and brain absorb the pinky-grey dome of light over the snow-sugared roofs of the city. I was going to enjoy myself here. I was going to take some great pictures. The first day I didn't even try. I rode the trams round the Ringstrasse, getting on and off as I pleased to sample the moods of the place. The weather was set, frozen like the vast baroque remnants of the redundant empire that had laid the city out. I hadn't seen what Schussner had done with spring, summer or autumn. I hadn't wanted to. This was going to be my Vienna, not his. And it was going to give itself to me. I just had to let it come. A photograph is a moment. But you have to wait for the moment to arrive. So I bided my time and looked and looked until I could see clearly. And then I was ready. Next morning, I was out at dawn. Snow flurries overnight meant Stephansplatz would be virginally white as well as virtually deserted. I hadn't figured out how to cope with the cathedral in one shot. Its spire stretched like a giraffe's neck into the silver-grey sky, but at ground level it was elephantine, squatting massively in the centre of the city. Probably there was no way to do it. I'd have to settle for something partial. In that weather, at that time, it could still be magical. But then, there's always been something magical about photography. It certainly seemed that way to the nineteenth-century pioneers, before the chemistry of it was properly understood. Pictures develop and strengthen and hold by an agency of their own. You can stand in a darkened room and watch a blank sheet of paper become a photograph. And even when you know why it happens you don't lose the sense of its mystery. That stays with you for ever. Perhaps that's why what happened at Stephansplatz that morning failed in some strange way to surprise me.
56.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Simon Costello knew that the purchase of the house in Pembroke Square had been a mistake within a year of his and Lois's moving in. A possession which can only be afforded by the exercise of stringent and calculated economy is best not afforded at all. But at the time it had seemed a sensible, as well as a desirable, move. He had had a run of successful cases and they were coming in with reassuring regularity. Lois had returned to her job at the advertising agency within two months of the birth of the twins, and had been given a rise which took her salary to thirty-five thousand. It was Lois who had argued the more strongly for a move, but he had put up little resistance to arguments which at the time had seemed compelling: the flat wasn't really suitable for a family, they needed more room, a garden, separate accommodation for an au pair. All these, of course, could have been achieved in a suburb or in a less fashionable part of London than Pembroke Square, but Lois was ambitious for more than additional space. Mornington Mansions had never been an acceptable address for an up-and-coming young barrister and a successful businesswoman. She never said it without a sense that even speaking the words subtly diminished her standing, socially and economically. Lois had decided that a necessary economy was for one of them to travel by public transport. Her firm was on the other side of London; obviously Simon must be the one to economise. The overcrowded tube journey, stayed in a mood of envious resentment, had become an unproductive thirty minutes of brooding on present discontents. He would recall his grandfather's house in Hampstead where he had stayed as a boy, the smell of dinner from the kitchen, his grandmother's insistence that the returning breadwinner, tired from his exhausting day in court, should be given peace, a little gentle cosseting, and relief from every petty domestic anxiety. She had been a 'lawyer's wife', indefatigable in legal good causes, elegantly present at all lawyers' functions, apparently content with the sphere of life which she had made her own. Well, that world had passed for ever. Lois had made it plain before their marriage that her career was as important as his. It hardly needed saying, this was, after all, a modern marriage. The job was important to her and important to them both. The house, the au pair, their whole standard of living depended on two salaries. And now what they were precariously achieving could be destroyed by that self-righteous, interfering Venetia. Venetia must have come straight from the court to their offices and she had been in a dangerous mood. Something or someone had upset her. But the word 'upset' was too weak, too bland for the intensity of furious disgust with which she had confronted him. Someone had driven her to the limit of her endurance. He cursed himself. If he hadn't been in his room, if he'd only left a minute earlier, the encounter wouldn't have taken place, she would have had the night to think it over, to consider what, if anything, she ought to do. Probably nothing. The morning might have brought sense. He remembered every word of her angry accusations. 'I defended Brian Cartwright today. Successfully. He told me that when you were his counsel four years ago you knew before trial that he had bribed three of the jury. You did nothing. You went on with the case. Is that true?' 'He's lying. It isn't true.' 'He also said that he passed over some shares in his company to your fiancee. Also before trial. Is that true?' 'I tell you, he's lying. None of its true.' The denial had been as instinctive as an arm raised to ward off a blow and had sounded unconvincing even to his own ears. His whole action had been one of guilt. The first cold horror draining his face was succeeded by a hot flush, bringing back shameful memories of his headmaster's study, of the terror of the inevitable punishment. He had made himself look into her eyes and had seen the look of contemptuous disbelief. If only he'd had some warning. He knew now what he should have said: 'Cartwright told me after the trial but I didn't believe him. I don't believe him now. That man will say anything to make himself important.' But he had told a more direct, more dangerous lie, and she had known that it was a lie. Even so, why the anger, why the disgust? What was that old misdemeanour to do with her? Who had sent Venetia Aldridge to be guardian of the conscience of their legal practice? Or of his, come to that? Was her own conscience so clear, her behaviour in court always immaculate? Was she justified in destroying his career? And it would be destruction. He wasn't sure what exactly she could do, how far she was prepared to go, but if this got about, even as a rumour, he was done for.
57.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Amateur Astronomy Many things have changed in astronomy over the past half-century. Until about 30 years ago, there was a great shortage of charts and catalogues. Telescopic equipment was limited and there were few books on practical astronomy. Today, the range of off-the-shelf telescopes and equipment covers almost everything one could need. Electronic calculators and computers have revolutionised almanacs and chart production, and facilitated the analysis of observations and the publication of results. All this must surely make this the golden age of amateur astronomy. Well, perhaps, but a great deal has been lost as well. Now one may have to travel 80 km to find a sky comparable to that found in urban areas 50 years ago. The daytime skies are now plagued by aircraft condensation trails which can persist for hours and often spread out to form amorphous clouds, making solar observations impossible and hampering night-time observation too. Too Much Choice Society is becoming 'overchoiced'. There are too many things to do, too many options, too many opportunities. In the new economy, the desire for the new product, service or next big thing is an addiction, and technology simply accelerates the pace of change: the noise, the proliferation of new goods and services, offering more and more choice. No sooner has the new product emerged off this virtual production line than the next one is about to be launched. The head spins, the brain races, the fatigue sets in; the disconnection from life begins. Choice is the mantra of the new economy, but more choice means more stress, less time and more complexity. Hence a new trend is afoot. The search is on for 'simplexity' - the simple things that give meaning in an increasingly complex world. But simplifying your life is not easy in an age of economic excess. There are more basic brands of detergent and breakfast cereals than we can ever need or want, more software upgrades, features and calling plans than we can keep track of. McAndrews Hotel Every summer we spend a fortnight in McAndrews Hotel in North Mayo, Ireland. It is a family tradition, instigated by my grandmother, and by now it has achieved a certain sacredness. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the ritual. We are of a kind, McAndrews clientele: old-fashioned, odd perhaps, some would say snobbish. I do not like the bad manners, the insolence of shop assistants which passes for egalitarianism in this present age; I resent chummy overtures from waiters who sometimes appear to restrain themselves with difficulty from slapping one on the back. I know most of my fellow-guests' names - like me they have been coming here since they were children - yet can rest assured that when I meet any of them in any part of the hotel, I shall be spared all social intercourse apart from a civil word of greeting. Such respect for dignity and personal privacy is hard to come by in commercial establishments these days.
58.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The Actor's Craft Derision and contempt are sprayed at actors from time to time. Much of this disdain is fuelled by the actors themselves when they're compelled by their film/theatre companies to talk about their craft (and themselves) in interviews. They should give the dancer Pavlova's reply to the man who asked her what she meant when she was dancing: 'If I could tell you,' she said, 'I wouldn't dance it.' But instead they all too easily fall into ponderous cliches, silly truisms or into the prurient jaws of the gossip machine. We should all pay heed to what Paul Scofield said in a letter to a friend of mine: 'I have found that an actor's work has life and interest only in its execution. It seems to wither away in discussion and become emptily theoretical and insubstantial. It has no rules (except perhaps audibility). With every play and every playwright the actor starts from scratch, as if he or she knows nothing and proceeds to learn afresh every time growing with the relationships of the characters and the insights of the writer. When the play has finished its run, he's empty until the next time. And its the emptiness which is, I find, apparent in any discussion of theatre work.' A review of Hamlet Adrian Lester's Hamlet is poised precariously between boyhood and manhood, and it is a performance of thrilling simplicity and assurance. His handling of the text and his physical and psychological self-control take him, in one leap, from brilliantly promising to frontline player: an actor with the intelligent confidence to be almost self-effacing. Lester plays an edgy, tetchy young man who feeds on a banked-down sense of anger, agile, watchful and driven, he deploys a sense of acid wit and generous humour that makes him both formidable and lovable. Although played down, the virtuosity of this performance is unmistakable. Observe Lester's body, the way his arms hang stiffly, giving you a sense of a figure waiting to be animated. Handy's portrayal of Horatio gives you a similar feeling of a body being moved by an inner force that he both knows and does not know. So what is acting? What is behaviour? Is the former an imitation or an evocation of the latter? Who and what animates these bodies, morally and physically? That is the central question about the life of the theatre. One director's approach to rehearsal The first stage of this director's rehearsal process is known as 'dropping in', a procedure which goes something like this. The stage manager projects the script onto a screen. The actors sit quietly while someone else is speaking, finding out what effect the words are having. When if is their turn to speak, they glance of the screen, digest the first phrase, think about what it means to them, wait to find the impulse - the reason to speak - then speak. For example, the line is, 'Queuing all night, the rain, do you remember?; Breathe. Let the thought drop in with your breath. A memory, a vision, an impression. Some people will imagine a queue, maybe at a bus stop on the way to rehearsals or for a rock concert in their youth. Having visualised the scene, find the impulse to speak it - what this director calls 'The pathway to the line'. Impulses can come from without or within. Look in the eyes of the other actor listening. Consider your character's situation. This director talks of 'dropping in' as a means of finding out what is going on. Don't pre-plan or pre-judge. Dare to go down there with an empty mind and trust that something will happen to you. The Perfect Theatre The perfect theatre should make you feel as if your presence has made a difference. Going to the theatre, going to any live performance, is an event and the staff need to have a sense of that, too. It's terribly alienating if you feel that its just any old job for the people working front of house. The theatre itself needs to create a relationship between the performer and the audience - no one in the audience should feel that they're getting an unreasonably prejudiced view of the actor. It's important that they're not too far away, they can hear, they can see, they can feel in some sense in contact with what's going on on stage. The proportions of an auditorium are important. They have to respond to the human voice and the scale of the human body. If an auditorium dwarfs the human body, there's something wrong with it because you can't deny the human form at the heart of drama. A lot of theatres in the late nineteenth century got it right because they managed to shape an auditorium that somehow embraces the stage. I like theatres that have a sense of the past in them. Like worn stone steps in a church, you get the sense of layers of human presence. From the point of view of the plays, you can't have something for everybody. You cant second-guess an audience because they don't know what they're going to want to see. When you visit the theatre, you want something done in a way you can't imagine, otherwise you may as well have stayed at home.
59.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Joanna's Lessons Joanna MacGregor has a hectic schedule as a concert pianist. So why has she added the task of writing books for young children learning the piano? Even a member of that mythical species, the completely tone deaf, could not fail to be stirred by a Joanna MacGregor performance. Simply to see her zipping around a keyboard grabbing fistfuls of notes at the behest of some unfeasible contemporary score is to watch a pianist pushing the human frame to its limits. But even her dazzling virtuosity was not enough to was one small boy at a recent concert she gave for kids. Like the rest of the audience, he had been cascaded with bits and bobs of pieces in every style from her vast repertoire of classical, jazz, ragtime, blues, techno, African, etc. He'd coolly watched her dive under the lid of the concert grand to pluck the wires - normally a surefire knockout for kids. Then as she drew breath and invited questions, he piped up: 'Can you play Match of the Day?' How many veterans of the concert hall platform would be floored by such a request? For Joanna MacGregor, though, it was simply a hoot. 'In his eyes, until I played that, I hadn't passed the test. I wasn't a proper pianist.' Needless to say, she sailed through and doubtless logged the experience for her next children's recital. MacGregor is rare among top-flight concert pianists for the interest she takes in how young children learn the instrument. She has just published her own elementary piano tutor for children: Joanna MacGregor's Piano World. And she has managed it despite a crippling work schedule. There hardly seems to be a festival this summer she is not gracing. Tomorrow she is in the thick of an all-day collaboration between nine young composers and artists. She runs her own recording label, Sound Circus. And by her own admission, she cannot meet an artist of any sort without being tempted to suggest a joint project. So why on earth take on the extra burden of writing a book? 'People who know me are clearly surprised. But I think the very first lessons are absolutely crucial. It says a lot about the music profession that we tend to concentrate on the top end, on this idea of the child as nascent virtuoso. Most people's interest in music is much more ordinary and everyday. I find that far more interesting!' In producing the first three books, MacGregor is drawing on vivid experience. Between the ages of 18 and 25, before she was getting concert engagements as a pianist, she taught a stream of beginners the piano. But most important in her make-up now as a musician who is unsurpassed in the breadth of her eclectic repertoire was the endless procession of small boys and girls traipsing into her childhood home, where her mother taught the piano. 'Not only was I fiddling around at the keyboard, but there were all these other children of all backgrounds wanting to play every sort of music - bits of classical, jazz, pop, improvisation. I wasn't part of that hothouse thing of forcing exceptional talent. I grew up with the idea of trying to make music available to people of all abilities.' Just as everyone should be able to learn how to swim or to speak a smattering of French, so, in her view, should everybody be able to make a stab at learning the piano. Some kids have a flair and make rapid progress. She is fascinated by the others: those who chug along at varying rates of progress, enjoying it for a while, but all too often giving up. This falling off happens at any stage. Some kids find the beginning too frustrating. Others rebel further down the line when the stakes get higher and parental pressure is driving them 'to be like those children on the telly.' 'I worry that some people use music, like sport, as a way of making their children achieve things, rather than just saying: it's music, it's there to enjoy. The reason children fall by the wayside is because they feel they are not going to match up to their parents' expectations. The production of her own training manual begs an obvious question. Does she have a poor opinion of the existing corpus of tutor books, or indeed of the general quality of piano teaching? 'I'm very reluctant to criticise other people's teaching or others' tutor books,' she says. What she does do is readily accept that her books, colourful and eye-catching though they are, are by no means the only books on the market designed to make the first steps enjoyable. Her own special wheeze for luring these neophytes, the fives, sixes and sevens, through those bewildering times is to weave a storyline into the books and their accompanying CDs. The challenge at this fragile stage is to make the work interesting. And so, from lesson one, there are accompaniments in a variety of styles for teacher - or parent - to play beneath a child's line. For kids whose parents aren't pianists the accompaniments are recorded on the CDs. Learning should be unadulterated fun, MacGregor insists. 'You have to allow them to improvise and give them a reason to play at either end of the keyboard and on the black notes and use the pedals.' As progress is made, bigger obstacles loom. Children need to be coaxed quite hard to read the music rather than rely on ear. Having relied for so much of her own childhood on her very keen ear, MacGregor has considerable sympathy on this score. But she believes the single most important factor is practice. How can children be persuaded to play a passage even once again, let alone many times over? She admits to not having practised rigorously until she went to the Royal Academy of Music, where she began building up a contemporary repertoire whose formidable difficulties demanded practice. Now she loves it. The eight hours a day that she gets through are the core of her musical life, she says, more important than performances. 'I have enormous sympathy with people who find it difficult. I don't think people talk about it enough.' The secret, whether you do it for twenty minutes or five hours, is to work out beforehand what it is you are aiming to do, she says. Other tips: treat yourself - play the whole piece through, however many wrong notes. And mix hard with easy.
6.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Heritage The true meaning and significance of heritage is that it gives people and communities a genuine sense of connection with the past. Obviously, we feel connected to our personal heritage usually, we know who and what our grandparents were, and we will have heard stories about how they lived. But, beyond that, there is a wider basic need to learn about our past, in order to help us understand and interpret our individual and national futures. Heritage represents a fundamental desire for continuity - assurance about the past goes a long way to assuring our future. It is through this continuity that we achieve our own place in history, our own immortality. In the same way that you inherit your genes, you also inherit a culture which has been passed down through many generations. There are aspects of your national heritage that you may not like or condone, but it is yours, and it is reassuring to feel a part of something. Heritage has a phenomenal amount to teach us and, I would say, is imperative for our well-being. It affects everything from customs to material culture. Traditionally, our link with the past was through the stories and legends passed down by our ancestors. But, because Western industrial society broke up communities and families, much of that oral tradition has already been lost. Instead, places and architectural 'memories' give us clues to our past. It is vitally important to conserve and restore these links as a testament to our ancestors' identity. The Fens Some while ago I began a novel, Waterland, in which, though I did not know it then, the landscape of that part of England known as the Pens was to play a major part. Since the novel was published I have often been asked why, as an ignorant and perhaps presumptuous Londoner, I chose to write about a part of the country with which I have no personal connection. The short answer is that I chose the Fens because of their apparent unobtrusiveness -- a flat and empty stage on which to set the drama of my book. This, as I learnt, was merely theory. The Fens, once one's imagination has got to grips with them, are neither flat nor empty. What I discovered was that the Fens, while as richly English as any other part of England, are also compellingly and hauntingly strange. It is remarkable that there should still exist in the middle of England a region which most English people find peculiarly foreign, especially when so many other distinctive (and remoter) areas of Britain have been ingested into the nations cultural and literary heritage. The Fens are both empty and brimming, both cultivated and tenaciously wild, apparently 'open' and 'obvious' yet profoundly mysterious. My own physical researches while writing my novel were in fact not so extensive. I have never been, yet, to Wisbech or Prickwillow. As a writer of fiction I am interested in imagined worlds, and I would much rather hazard an inspired guess at some point of authenticity than go for documentary proof. Yet this very attempt to 'imagine' the Fens has its special logic, for, as the pages of Edward Storey's scholarly book abundantly show, the Fens are, peculiarly, not just a landscape but a state of mind. Museums Museums must make their collections accessible. In the past, this simply meant packing them into display cases, often with wordy labels that made little concession to the lay person. Nowadays, accessibility should demand more than this. Displays can be lively and interesting, making the best use of theatrical or architectural techniques to capture visitors' attention and perhaps stimulate emotional response. But museums should be about more than their displays. They should make their collections accessible to the widest possible community. The provision of loan boxes of objects for class teachers is one known example of this and, recently, this principle has been extended by some museums so that similar material is made available for use in treating elderly people who are losing their memory. Museums concern themselves with 'artefacts and specimens' - not replicas. They exist to facilitate an encounter with authenticity. They present items that actually existed - were used - had meaning - at some historical time. This is their great strength, and is what distinguishes them from heritage centres and theme parks, books and CD-ROMs. Museums which rise to the challenge which this distinction implies and provide exciting and accessible displays, catalogues and outreach programmes, will find that their apparent competitors in 'virtual history' are in fact their allies, stimulating an appetite for the 'real thing' that museums are uniquely placed to satisfy. Architecture and Environment The desire to preserve things is not new, but now change in our towns comes with such speed and on such a scale that most of us are affected by it in some way. It turns some people into rabid preservationists and it encourages others to think more closely about the nature of towns as we know them today and their future. It may be quite reasonably argued that the generations who have lived through events such as world wars and the like are more inclined to preservation than their predecessors - anything which expresses stability becomes important. If there is a psychological need for preservation it is part of the planners job to take account of it. Change is no enemy if we learn how to handle it. Physical change, in other words, change in the environment provided by our towns, reflects social change - change in our numbers, in our welfare and in our demands.
60.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	We are Talking Big Boots here. Really BIGTIME Boots. I stood in my 800-dollar-each designer-label cowboy boots on the rocks of an old formation in the Arizona desert sand. Money no object. I wore the whole truly cowboy outfit and if you had the outfit you might be a cowboy. But I was not. It wasn't working. I squinted info the morning sun looking out at the Arizona mountains and I had to admit, I was not at home on the range, Flying in from Denver just after dawn, I had the feeling that I just might pass far an ol' cowhand coming in from the sky. The feeling didn't last past the first real cowboy in the luggage hall of Phoenix airport. He was wearing a sweat-stained I-shirt, needed a shave, and was hoisting a dirty canvas bag off the conveyer belt when he caught sight of my brand new cowboy boots. He slowly raised one eyebrow and moved off out of the door without looking back. There ought to be, somewhere, hanging in a closet, a suit of clothes an ex-racing driver can put on without feeling like he is from another planet. Something he could wear so that wherever he goes he doesn't get the feeling that everybody is talking another language and doing whatever they do at half speed. I liked, no, not liked... I flatout loved being a racing driver, driving racing cars. I am addicted to it and it is all I know how to do. But I don't do it any more. I couldn't if I wanted to. Question is, I thought, looking into the mean, rust-coloured rock of the mountains in the distance, what do I do now? A racing driver should have one or two fall-back identities lined up for when he climbs out of his car. I thought I did, but when I reached for them they just disappeared. How about: an ex-racing driver adds colour to the commentary direct from the trackside? 'We got fifteen guys, all of them former Indy and Formula One drivers, fifteen guys in front of you, Forrest, standing in line to be colour commentators. We'll call you.' Well then, how about: an ex-racing driver coins a partnership to sell classic cars? That lasted nearly all winter with phone calls, lunches, lawyers und meetings with bankers. But it was the year nobody was buying old Ferraris and Honda was 'reviewing' its dealer list. So in the end I gracefully withdrew before there was nothing to withdraw from. Being an 'ex' anything is depressing work. I mean you tell me, how badly do you want to hear about how I was almost the World Champion? Nobody wants to hear a story that ends in 'almost'. And even if I had been world champion you could probably just about stand to listen to the story for five minutes before your ears turned to cement. Last year's champion was last year. Not that I want sympathy. Which is just as well, since I don't get any. Well, why should I? I had a good run, made money and hung on to enough. But oh, man, I miss the heat of slipping into that graceful, elegant, shrink-wrapped super-tech machine with seven hundred horsepower behind my neck. Zero to a hundred and fifty miles an hour in 4,9 seconds. And yes, I miss coming within an eyelash of killing myself every race or so. I miss the bright and gorgeous people and the reporters who acted as if what I said mattered. Being famous, even in a minor way, isn't all bad. Businessmen and politicians bragged to their friends that they knew me. Little boys slid under fences to get my autograph. And now that I don't drive a racing car... Only last week the phone rang twice. I have time in the morning and I have time in the afternoon. And let me just check, but I think tomorrow is free, so much empty time. I looked up into the soft blue morning sky. No buzzards overhead. Maybe Arizona doesn't have buzzards. But a couple of little brown birds in a saguaro cactus just in front of me were giving me advice, something like 'get away from our nest before we sing our hearts out'. It had never occurred to me that the desert had songbirds. It did occur to me that a bogus cowboy in designer boots had a lot to learn.
61.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Photography When a photographer takes a photograph, he or she makes a selection of visual information that is determined by his or her technical and aesthetic skills, personal views and experience, together with a set of social and cultural norms. And in the course of this book we shall see how these factors not only affect the style, content and expression of a photograph, but also how those images are perceived and responded to by the viewer. For example, we might consider that the casual reader of a newspaper will have an implicit understanding of the photographic images reproduced on the page. But rather than accepting the photograph at face value, we might question whether it accurately recorded the scene as it would have looked at the time. Or, in contrast, does it communicate the photographer's point of view? Is it the precise instant recorded that is of particular importance, or should the photograph on the page be understood as a symbol to represent a state of affairs in the world? More than a game Sport for me has always been more than just a game. The most successful people in sport have total self-belief. You need tunnel vision if you want to succeed in sport. There's only one route to being the best and you have to put everything else to one side. Sport is ruthless and no one else is going to do it for you. It's sink or swim. Sport has taught me personal discipline and determination, but it can also teach you the benefits of working as one of a team. My sport allows and encourages you to excel individually, yet it is a team game and you have to balance these two aspects. It's very much like life - you can succeed as an individual, but you must never forget there are others around you. Sport has given me a great deal - and not just financially. It has opened doors for me and opened my eyes, and I've seen things around the world that others will never see. But you also have to give up a lot for those perks. Tuning in Some experiences etch themselves so sharply on our memory that they form islands of clarity in our recollection. For me, such a momentous occasion took place one night in California many years ago, when I lay awake listening to the rapturous strains of a mockingbird singing from an invisible location in one of the tall trees that were dotted around the suburban neighbourhood. I don't suffer from insomnia - it was the exquisite artistry of the singer that kept me awake. As I followed his intricately woven melodies, I found myself drawn into an unexpected aesthetic environment. In order to follow the patterns that issued from the bird, I had to call on my experience of jazz and Indian classical music. The bird had me convinced that I was being treated to an ad lib performance of the most breathtaking improvisational acrobatics. I groaned and I cheered as one improbable musical variation followed another through the open window where I lay listening, until finally I fell asleep.
62.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Holiday reading Summer promises us two of life's great joys: escaping home and reading books - joys that are, of course, intimately connected. Books may help us to feel more at home in the world at large. We can relate our experiences to those described in great books written long ago or in distant lands because there are fewer human types than there are people. In the books of others, we find our own thoughts, embarrassments and dramas. Authors can locate words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, or can express our very own thoughts, but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we could not match. What was shy and confused within us is unapologetically and cogently phrased in them, a congruence all the more striking if the work was written by someone in a far-flung place or in another age. We feel grateful to these strangers for reminding us of who we are. Through reading and travel, we escape the deadening effect of habit. Our eyes are never more open than during our first few days in a new place: except perhaps during our reading of a great book, which guides us to the interest of things we had previously ignored. Our mind is like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through consciousness. Our attention is drawn to the shades of the sky, to the changeability of a face, to the hypocrisy of a friend, or to a submerged sadness about a situation that we had previously not even known we could feel sad about. Author's Note These travel reflections were all published as articles in the Observer newspaper over a seven-year period. Here and there I have restored some small cuts by the editor, which had to be made if the piece was to fit the page, but otherwise I have added very little. The occasional outright howler has been corrected, but only if it was a matter of detail which I should have got right in the first place. Hindsight would have allowed further improvements, but there would have been no end to the process. In the second article about China, for example, it seemed likely at the time, and for some time after, that the Hong Kong dollar would hold up. A year later it fell. If I were to rewrite the piece so as to predict this fact, it would become a claim to prescience, or at any rate no longer a report written at that moment. But like any other flying visitor, in South East Asia or anywhere else, I was there at that moment, ignorant as to what would happen next, and fully occupied with making the most elementary sense of what had happened already. That has been the real story of mass jet travel: the world opening up to people who have no qualifications for exploring it except the price of a ticket. But I have never been able to believe that all my fellow travellers were quite blind. Even a postcard can be written with a purpose. Ecotourism If there were awards for tourism phrases that have been hijacked, diluted and misused, then 'ecotourism' would earn top prize. The term first surfaced in the early 1980s, reflecting a surge in environmental awareness and a realisation by tour operators that many travellers wanted to believe their presence abroad would not have a negative impact. It rapidly became the hottest marketing tag a holiday could carry. These days the ecotourism label has broadened out to cover anything from a two-week tour living with remote tribes, to a one-hour motor boat trip through an Australian gorge. In fact, any tour that involves cultural interaction, natural beauty spots, wildlife or a dash of soft adventure is likely to be included in the overflowing ecotourism folder. There is no doubt the original motives behind the movement were honourable attempts to provide a way for those who cared to make informed choices, but the lack of regulations and a standard industry definition left many travellers lost in an ecotourism jungle. Transylvanian Journey The notebook covering the Transylvanian leg of my journey was lost for 50 years, and only restored a few years ago by a great stroke of luck. It has been a great help to me in reconstructing that period and committing it to print, but not the unfailing prop it should have been. For in Transylvania I found myself having a much easier time of it than I had planned, drifting from one hospitable country house to another, often staying for weeks. When I came to a standstill during those long halts, writing stopped too; as I was keeping a journal of travel, I wrongly thought there was nothing to record. I was often slow to take it up again when I moved on and, even then, jotted notes sometimes took the place of sustained narrative. Fearing some details might have got out of sequence when I started writing the present book, I surrounded these passages with a cloud of provisos and hedged bets. Then the thought that these pages were not a guidebook persuaded me that it didn't matter very much, so I let the story tell itself free of debilitating caveats.
63.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Family Business 'Look here, it's no good!' said my Dad. We were in the car on the way back to London. My father, with my brother Maurice in tow, had just collected me and my trunk from the posh girls' school I attended. He had also just sat through Parent's Day, in the course of which I was presented with the Latin prize and the prize for the girl who had done best in her end-of-school exams. He had had a long conversation with my headteacher, and now here we were bound for home and holidays. 'What isn't?' I said, though I had guessed the trend of his thoughts from my father's unusual silence. He was a talkative man as a rule. 'You can't fool me. You'll do what you want now,' he said. 'What with all those certificates. I was told you will get a scholarship to Oxford.' 'So?' I said, brazening it out. 'Mightn't that be useful?' 'I am also given to understand,' he went on, and then I knew the confrontation was coming, 'that you have ambitions to be a barrister. A barrister of all things!' My father knew quite a lot about barristers and the law. 'I just said that,' I said. 'I couldn't think of anything else to say!' 'And apparently,' he went on, 'you have the right sort of personality - you can pick the bones out of a mass of material pretty quickly, you have the gift of the gab and you enjoy performing.' 'I don't know about that,' I said. 'All I know is what I see in television dramas.' 'Be that as it may,' he went on, pulling himself together, 'I feel your heart's never going to be in the business now. Obviously, you'll go to Oxford University, and after that I can't see you fancying it.' The trouble was that, like most children of hereditary trades, I did feel confined by the family expectations. I could see there were various professions open to me, and I wanted to explore the possibilities. At the same time, like a coward, I didn't want to upset my father. I wasn't as frightened of him as Maurice was - I was the favourite - but I found him formidable. 'It's too soon to know,' I said feebly. 'I tell you you're not going to want to join us,' said my father, who had an annoying way of usually being right in such prophecies, 'and it's a pity because you've got the gifts - the brains, the nerves, the vision.' 'There's still Maurice,' I said, sullen. My father snorted. We both knew Maurice hated the business. 'Anyway,' I went on, 'you could always use me as a sort of consultant.' It was not as if my mother was around to lend a hand - she had died early in my childhood and my father had brought me and Maurice up. Maurice was two years younger than I was, and because he was motherless, early in our lives I got into the habit of taking care of him. It was not a hardship. I loved Maurice. Because the business was so successful we lived in a good deal of luxury - in a big house in London, posh schools for both of us, nice clothes, parties, theatres, operas. My father knew all kinds of people - politicians, actors, businessmen - and our house buzzed with good talk and interesting encounters. 'I tell you what,' my father continued our conversation. 'You can go on helping us out in holidays until you leave Oxford, and then if you decide to leave us you can. It will give you a bit of pocket money, and be a real help to me.' 'OK,' I said, relieved to be spared immediate choices and decisions, and especially the bout of depression and sulks my father would sink into if I opposed him. This was the way he controlled us. So it happened. In my last term at school, and then on vacations from university, I lent a hand, never more than about twice a year, and always on the safer assignments. I became one of the smarter undergraduates, with a little house of my own, a small but powerful white car, designer clothes, and a black dress with a Paris label that I intended to wear when I took my final exams. It was in my last term that my father came up to see me and drove me out to a village for a meal and a chat. There were only a few weeks to go. My tutor predicted I would get a First Class degree (in Law), and I knew that if I kept my head and spent these last precious days carefully arranging information in my mind, he might well be right. I felt poised, confident, concentrated. This was not to be. My father told me that, in about a week, he needed me to do one last assignment for him, that it was the most important piece of business the family firm had ever attempted, and that he would see that it was more than worth my while. 'But Dad,' I protested, 'I've got my final exams coming up, and I just need to concentrate on that. It's really important that I do well and I don't want to have to think about anything else just now.' I could tell that such pressures were simply beyond my father's imagination (or was it that he was somehow jealous of my life away from him?) and that he would interpret a refusal from me as a heartless betrayal in his hour of need. That was not all. As he described the procedures I saw more clearly than ever before the single-mindedness of my father -- the clarity and resourcefulness with which he set about his life's work, the dynamic energy, the perfect self-control of the man. In his way he was a sort of genius, and I bowed to that in him. It made my own plans and hopes seem less important. 'All right,' I said. 'I'll do it.'
64.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	There are some activities that just will not be rushed. They take the time they take. If you are late for a meeting, you can hurry. But if you are impatient with the mayonnaise and add the oil too quickly, it curdles. If you start tugging with frustration on a tangled fishing line, the knot just becomes tighter. The mind, too, works at different speeds. Some of its functions are performed at lightning speeds; others take seconds, minutes, hours, days or even years to complete their course. Some can he speeded up - we can become quicker at solving crossword puzzles or doing mental arithmetic. But others cannot he rushed, and if they are, then they will break down, like the mayonnaise, or get tangled up, like the fishing line. 'Think fast; we need the results' may sometimes be as absurd a notion, or at least as counterproductive, as the attempt to cram a night's rest into half the time. We learn, think and know in a variety of ways, and these modes of the mind operate at different speeds, and are good for different mental jobs. 'He who hesitates is lost,' says one proverb. 'Look before you leap,' says another. And both are true. Roughly speaking, the mind possesses three different processing speeds. The first is faster than thought. Some situations demand an unselfconscious, instantaneous reaction. When my motorbike skidded on a wet road in London some years ago, my brain and my body immediately choreographed for me an intricate and effective set of movements that enabled me to keep my seat - and it was only after the action was all over that my conscious mind and my emotions started to catch up. Neither a concert pianist nor an Olympic fencer has time to figure out what to do next. There is a kind of 'intelligence' that works more rapidly than thinking. This mode of fast physical intelligence could be called our 'wits'. (The five senses were originally known as 'the five wits'.) Then there is thought itself: the sort of intelligence which does involve figuring matters out, weighing up the pros and cons, constructing arguments and solving problems. A mechanic working out why an engine will not fire, a scientist trying to interpret an intriguing experimental result, a student wrestling with an assignment: all are employing a way of knowing that relies on reason and logic, on deliberate conscious thinking. We often call this kind of intelligence 'intellect'. Someone who is good at solving these sorts of problems we call 'bright' or 'clever'. But below this, there is another mental register that proceeds more slowly still. It is often less purposeful and clear-cut, more playful, leisurely or dreamy. In this mode we are ruminating or mulling things over; being contemplative or meditative. Perched on a seaside rock, lost in the sound and the motion of the surf, or hovering just on the brink of sleep or waking, we are in a different mental mode from the one we find ourselves in as we plan a meal or dictate a letter. This leisurely, apparently aimless, way of knowing and experiencing is just as intelligent as the other faster ones. Allowing the mind time to meander is not a luxury that can safely be cut back as life or work gets more demanding. On the contrary, thinking slowly is a vital part al the cognitive armoury. We need the tortoise mind just as much as we need the hare brain. Some kinds of everyday predicament are better, more effectively approached with a slow mind. Some mysteries can only be penetrated with a relaxed, unquesting mental attitude. Recent scientific study shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill defined. Deliberate thinking works well when the problem is easily conceptualised. When we are trying to decide where to spend our holidays, it may well be perfectly obvious what the parameters are. But when we are not sure what needs to be taken into account, or even which questions to pose - or when the issue is too subtle to be captured by the familiar categories of conscious thought - we need recourse to the tortoise mind. If the problem is how best to manage a difficult group of people at work, or whether to give up being a manager completely and retrain as a teacher, we may be better advised to sit and ponder than to search frantically for explanations and solutions. This type of intelligence is associated with what we call creativity, or even 'wisdom'. Poets have always known the limitations of conscious, deliberate thinking, and have sought to cultivate these slower, mistier ways of knowing. Philosophers have written about the realms of the mind that lie beyond and beneath the conscious intellect. It is only recently, however, that scientists have started to explore directly the slower, less deliberate ways of knowing. The hybrid discipline of 'cognitive science' is revealing that the unconscious realms of the human mind will successfully accomplish a number of unusual, interesting and important tasks if they are given the time. They will learn patterns of a degree of subtlety which normal consciousness cannot even see, make sense out of situations that are too complex to analyse, and get to the bottom of certain difficult issues much more successfully than the questing intellect.
65.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	England's breakfast revolution The importance of a good breakfast is beyond dispute according to health experts, but in historical terms breakfast is a relatively new arrival in England, with descriptions of breakfast seldom featuring in medieval literature. Admittedly, there are scattered references to travellers having a meal at dawn before embarking on arduous journeys, and to the sick sitting down to breakfast for medicinal reasons, but most people went without unless they were monarchs or nobles. However, in the sixteenth century it gradually became the norm, not the exception. Some writers have attributed this to the greater availability of food. Proponents of this view have not always considered other profound social changes. For example, new patterns of employment may well offer a plausible explanation for the greater importance now attached to breakfast, as individuals were increasingly employed for a prescribed number of hours. Often this involved starting work extremely early. Thus, having a meal first thing in the morning was rooted in necessity, and was no longer associated with social status alone.
66.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Mission to Mars Wanted: a middle-aged, married couple for a 501-day round trip to Mars. Applicants must be physically and emotionally robust. This will be the profile of the very first Martian astronauts if multi-millionaire Dennis Tito's plans to launch a capsule on 5 January 2018 actually lead to fruition. The capsule will take the crew to about 160 km above Mars. The spacecraft will use the gravity of Mars to allow it to return to Earth without burning any more fuel, for fuel efficiency is a priority - the 2018 deadline has been fixed since the next launch window when Mars and Earth align again isn't until 2031. It's a normal order, but the race is on to develop systems involving totally new technologies. Given that these can be put in place soon enough, the spacecraft might just make it. But even if it never leaves Earth, the efforts to achieve these ambitious goals will not be in vain, as they will lead to valuable advances for future missions.
67.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	CRYING Charles Darwin thought that the human tendency to cry had no obvious evolving purpose. He was almost certainly wrong. More recently scientists have pointed to its social significance, with psychiatrist John Bowlby highlighting the role of crying in developing the attachment between mother and child. Many believe that tears, at least during childhood, are mainly an expression of helplessness. However, the persistence of crying into adulthood is harder to explain. It seems that the sound of crying becomes considerably less important than the visual signal it conveys. It may have been advantageous to early human communities as a means of promoting trust and social connectedness. Tears can undoubtedly have other causes too. We may cry to express sympathy for those suffering terrible injustice. Furthermore, tears can be shed involuntarily, rather to our embarrassment, when we hear inspiring music or moving speeches. We may cry when watching a sentimental film, but interestingly, this is more likely to occur in company than when we are alone. The social function of crying would seem to be undeniable, but research continues.
68.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Blogging: Confessing to the world Some time ago, a website highlighted the risks of public check-ins - online announcements of your where-abouts. The site's point was blunt: you may think you are just telling the world, 'Hey, I'm at this place' - but you are also advertising your out-and-about-ness to all kinds of people everywhere - not all of them people you might like to bump into. This appeared to confirm the growing awareness that there might be a downside to all the frantic sharing the web has enabled. The vast new opportunities to publish any and every aspect of our lives to a potentially global audience hold out all sorts of tantalising possibilities: Wealth! Fame! So we plunge into the maelstrom of the internet, tossing confessions, personal photos and stories into the digital vortex. Too late we realise that the water is crowded and treacherous - and we are lost. Depressing? Perhaps, but don't give up. This future has a map, drawn for us years ago by a reckless group of online pioneers. In the early days of the web, they sailed these waters and located all the treacherous shoals. They got fired from their jobs, found and lost friends and navigated celebrity's temptations and perils - all long before the invention of social networking. These pioneers, the first wave of what we now call bloggers, have already been where the rest of us seem to be going. Before their tales scroll off our collective screen, it's worth spending a little time with them. After all, those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repost it. In January 1994, Justin Hall, a 19-year-old student, began posting to the 'WWW', as it was then known, something inhabited mostly by grad students, scientists and a handful of precocious teens like him. The web had been invented at CERN, the international physics lab in Switzerland, so researchers could more easily share their work. Hall saw something else: an opportunity to share his life. Link by link, he built a hypertext edifice of autobiography, a dense thicket of verbal self-exposure leavened with photos and art. In January 1996, on a dare, he began posting a daily blog, and readers flocked to the spectacle of a reckless young man pushing the boundaries of this new medium in every direction at once. Hall's ethos was absolute: cross his path and you could appear on his site; no topic was taboo. Certainly, this was the work of an exhibitionist, but there was also a rigour and beauty to his project that only a snob would refuse to call art. One day though, visitors to Hall's site discovered his home page gone, replaced with a single anguished video titled Dark Night. His story tumbled out; he'd fallen spectacularly in love, but when he started writing about it on his site he was told 'either the blog goes, or I do'. He'd published his life on the internet and, Hall protested, 'it makes people not trust me'. The blog went, but the dilemma persists. Sharing online is great. But if you expect your song of yourself to 'make people want to be with you', you'll be disappointed. In 2002, Heather Armstrong, a young web worker in Los Angeles, had a blog called Dooce. Occasionally, she wrote about her job at a software company. One day an anonymous colleague sent the address of Armstrong's blog to every vice president at her company - including some whom she'd mocked - and that was the end of her job. Those who study the peculiar social patterns of the networked world have a term to describe what was at work here. They call it the 'online distribution effect': that feeling so many of us have that we can get away with saying things online that we'd never dream of saying in person. But our digital lives are interwoven with our real lives. When we pretend otherwise, we risk making terrible, life-changing mistakes. Armstrong's saga had a happy ending. Though she was upset by the experience and stopped blogging for several months afterwards, she ended up getting married and restarting her blog with a focus on her new family. Today she is a star in the burgeoning ranks of 'mommy bloggers' and her writing supports her house hold. Once a poster child for the wages of web indiscretion, she has become a virtuoso of managed self-revelation. What Armstrong has figured out is something we would all do well to remember: the web may allow us to say anything, but that doesn't mean we should.
69.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Build it yourself at the UK's first bamboo bike workshop A course at the Bamboo Bike Club, run by engineers James Marr and Ian McMillan, buys you a computer-designed custom frame plus a fun weekend of bike-building. It's Saturday morning in Hackney Wick, east London, and apart from a mechanic deep in the bowels of a truck, the only sign of life among the small factories on a backstreet is a whine of machinery from an upper window - work has begun at Bamboo Bike Club, Britain's only bamboo bike-building course. I've gone along to watch the action. There's a sense of energy and industry. And of fun. Woodwork class was never like this. Bamboo is one of the most interesting trends to emerge in bike construction. Names like Californian manufacturer Calfee Design or Yorkshire's Bamboo Bikes have revived a construction method pioneered as early as 1894. The problem for most cyclists is the price. A ready-made bamboo frame from these companies retails for $2,995, or PS1,868. It was this, plus the design challenge, that led James and Ian to spend years cooped up in a shed in Brecon, Wales. Their idea was to establish a boutique bamboo bike business with products within reach of the average cyclist. Only after they had refined their research into a marketable product - James now tosses out phrases like 'close-noded thick-wall tubes' while talking about bamboo - did they realise they were on the wrong track. 'We realised we didn't want just to sell frames. We wanted to share the joy of making something; the craft of creating something unique and sustainable,' James explains. The outcome was something more community than company, and as such, the Bamboo Bike Club is still an occupation sandwiched between full-time jobs - James makes wind turbines and Ian is a civil engineer. But they seem to be on the right track, with monthly courses whose competitive price buys you a computer-designed custom bike frame plus a fun weekend of bike-building. The question for me, a king of the botch job - my terrible handiwork failures litter my house - was about quality. On day one, the boys explain how to select bamboo for strength and how to form strong joints before tubes are glued lightly in place in the workshop: first the front triangle composed of 40 mm diameter bamboo; then the thinner, more fiddly seat and the chain assembly. Alloy tubes are inserted for the handlebars, wheel forks and other parts which require the strength and precise engineering impossible in bamboo. All this, together with the technical skill involved in using jigs, power tools and design blueprints, is a leap of faith for someone whose idea of DIY is flatpack furniture assembly. Accurate cutting for a clean joint can be tricky, for example. James and Ian buzz cheerfully between workbenches, supervising every cut, triple-checking every joint, and will take over if a task seems insurmountable. The self-build is half the attraction for most participants; it may be no coincidence that all those on this course were engineers. For the rest of us, Ian reassures that everyone messes up once or twice. No problem - just get another piece and have another go. Such is the benefit of bamboo. Each length has been pre-checked for quality, so you get to indulge in frame aesthetics: plain bamboo, black or mottled. Sunday is a more relaxed day, mainly spent building the lugs. Or rather, wraps: hemp bindings wrapped around the joints and dropouts then glued with epoxy resin to form a strong bond that disperses loads evenly throughout the frame. With a final polymer coating for waterproofing, the bike is ready for wheels, brakes, gears, saddle and any other individual touches. And it is a bike built for the long haul, just as strong, the pair claim, as its metal equivalents. Ian has ridden his for over a year on a 16-mile commute, while James has failed to destroy one bike off-road over three months of testing. 'To be honest, our bikes are over-engineered - we use larger diameter tubes and over-thick bindings - but I prefer it like that,' James says. Technical issues aside, how good does a bamboo bike look? Somewhat scruffy alongside professional frames, it turns out - the hemp weave can look a bit like parcel tape, for example. But there's no denying their individuality and that, say James and Ian, is the point. Personally though, I believe that any bicycle made from this kind of material should be a relaxed affair, something for cruising sedately around on rather than racing. I therefore plump for a frame that avoids the stiff angularity of my existing metal machine: a 'Classic English' giving a gentle, easy-going ride. They also cycle well. I take James's bike for a spin and the ride is light, stiff and smooth thanks to bamboo's ability to dampen vibration. Impressive, considering I target every pothole. 'Some people love the build, but for me these workshops come together when the bike is on the road,' James says. 'They're so light, so effortless to ride. So much fun to ride too - take a Harley-style retro bike, add 10 and you're still not close.' And the price? Less than PS500.
7.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The two sisters kept Lily's driving a secret from Chen for some time. She would drive around the allotments and the railway line and gasworks, shooting the tiny hump-backed bridge with all four wheels in the air and a tremendous bump (Lily's only misjudgement), before completing the journey by the gasworks in an odour of sulphur and brimstone. Chen, however, was actually amused by what his wife had been doing behind his back. 'So you can really drive it then, Lily? Well done!' Men were strange creatures, Mui thought. Brother-in-law should have been upset about this. Yet he was soon enthusiastically making plans with Lily for a jaunt and obviously revelling in her mastery of this new skill. They fixed on a Monday at the beginning of next month. This was the slackest day of the week, they decided to leave early in the morning and return by midday. That way they need lose no customers. In the meantime Lily would practise around the allotments. Resolved to go along with the majority despite her personal misgivings, Mui had been to buy a road-map. She had been able to get a ten percent discount, which impressed Chen, though Lily felt a bit insulted by Mui's lack of faith in her navigating abilities. Within an hour of stepping over the newspapers and out of the front door, they were looking at the English Channel. Lily had driven impeccably. Even Mui, sitting in the back ready to give directions, one hand on the cross-braces of Man Kee's rompers as he pressed his nose against the window, had to grant this. On the road Lily had actually overtaken a couple of laggard vehicles with immense verve and such timing that Mui had pressed her lips closely together against her own protest. Chen went as far as applauding. Now, after coming through the gasworks of this seaside town (reassuring, familiar sight), past the lagoon and its miniature motor boats, they were moving smoothly along the empty promenade. Lily parked in a small street off the sea front which was full of empty bays. She was unclear about the meanings of the various roadmarkings and preferred to pay a fee rather than risk being towed away. Or even being served with a summons. Might this evidence of basic prudence set Mui's mind at rest? On the way down Lily had several times observed her elder sister's taut face in the driving mirror, which she used with great frequency. Perhaps it would be best not to put worries in Mui's mind which would not have occurred to her in the first place. Lily personally locked all the van doors and meticulously tested each in turn. 'Don't worry,' Chen joked. 'No one will want that heap of tin.' The girls bristled. Lily accused her husband of ingratitude. Mui rebuked him for being proud and too readily deceived by appearances. Taken aback, Chen took Man Kee ahead of the two sisters to look at the grey barbarian sea. He perched Son on the top railing and put his arms around his stomach. Man Kee was a soft, warm, and what was more, these days an increasingly responsive bundle. He reacted by putting his hand, a tiny replica of the shape of Chen's, with its broad palm and stubby fingers, on his father's sleeve. And it was in that moment that Chen resolved to bring Son up his way. He would have an education in figures (Chen's own weak point) and grow up to own many restaurants, gaining experience in all aspects of the trade on the way. The sombre sea put Chen in a pleasing melancholy as he planned Man Kee's career. There was a trail of smoke just before the horizon met the sea in a thin line and then, suddenly shimmering in the glitter of the rising morning sun on the metal waves, a hull; and in a small cute of the railings was a grey telescope. The sparkle of the water instantly altered Chen's mood. He put a coin in the slot and trained the glass on the ship. He was unable to find it at first, although he had aimed off carefully with the gun-sight on top of the barrel. Chen swung the tube in wide circles. There it was! Gone again. Chen swivelled the instrument more carefully. Now he had it in the centre of the circle, surprisingly large, red, and very rusty with a small bow wave: tramp steamer. Chen lifted Man Kee to the eyepiece. 'Do you see the ship, Son?' he asked softly. 'It is a special little ship for people like us, Son. It is very little and very old but that is only what strangers see. We know better, don't we, Son, because it is the ship that will take us all back home when we are finished here. It will take you to your homeland, Son, which you have never seen.' Chen kissed the top of Man Kee's head. Behind him now were Lily and Mui. Lily put her arm round Husband's shoulders. 'The little old ship,' said Chen. 'Let your mother see, Son.' Man Kee would not be parted from the telescope and when he had been persuaded to relinquish his grip the whirring inside the mounting had stopped and all Lily could see was a quivering opaque circle of white light with a scratched surface. By the time Chen had found a second coin the ship was over the horizon and Lily was left with a view of seagulls scavenging gash in the wake.
8.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don't know what else to call it. I have little story to tell and I end neither with a death or a marriage. Instead I leave my reader in the air. This book consists of my recollections of a man with whom I was thrown into close contact only at long intervals, and I have little knowledge of what happened to him in between. I suppose that by the exercise of invention I could fill the gaps plausibly enough and so make my narrative more coherent; but I have no wish to do that. I only want to set down what I know. To save embarrassment to people still living I have given to the persons who play a part in this story names of my own contriving, and I have in other ways taken pains to make sure that no one should recognise them. The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. Then my book, if it is read at all, will be read only for what intrinsic interest it may possess. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realised that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature. Then it will be quite clear of whom I write in this book and those who want to know at least a little about his early life may find in it something to their purpose. I think my book, within its acknowledged limitations, will be a useful source of information to my friend's biographers. I do not pretend that the conversations I have recorded can be regarded as verbatim reports. I never kept notes of what was said on this or the other occasions, but I have a good memory for what concerns me, and though I have put these conversations in my own words they faithfully represent, I believe, what was said. I remarked a little while back that I have invented nothing but I have taken the liberty that historians have taken to put into the mouths of the persons of my narrative speeches that I did not myself hear and could not possibly have heard. I have done this for the same reasons that the historians have, to give liveliness and verisimilitude to scenes that would have been ineffective if they had been merely recounted. I want to be read and I think I am justified in doing what I can to make my book readable. The intelligent reader will easily see for himself where I have used this artifice, and he is at perfect liberty to reject it. Another reason that has caused me to embark upon this work with apprehension is that the persons I have chiefly to deal with are of another culture. It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed and the poets they read. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you cant come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them. You can only know if you are them. And because you cannot know persons of a nation foreign to you except from observation, it is difficult to give them credibility in the pages of a book. I have never attempted to deal with any but my own countrymen, and if I have ventured to do otherwise in short stories it is because in them you can treat your characters more summarily. You give the reader broad indications and leave him to fill in the details. In this book, I do not pretend that my characters are as they would see themselves; they are seen, as is my main character, through my own eyes.
9.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Othello The transfer to London from Stratford of an exceptional production of Shakespeare's play Othello allows me to make amends for an unfair review that I wrote when the show opened last spring. Back then I complained that Ray Fearon was too young to play the title role and I was guilty of running down his acting. I still think its a distortion of the tragedy to remove the age difference between Othello and Desdemona but I eat my words about the rest of Mr Fearon's magnificent performance. Indeed the whole cast is magnificent. Memorable scenes include the one where Cassio's competitive games with the other young officers get dangerously out of hand, and the moment when Iago begins to lose control and has to struggle to get a grip on himself. And I challenge anyone not to be moved to tears during the scene where Emilia prepares Desdemona for bed. The pace and tension throughout are terrific. Do not miss this production. Lake Vostok In the heart of Antarctica, nothing stirs. On the fringes of the continent there are penguins, seals and birds aplenty. But up on the great white plateau in the interior, life has no foothold. Except, that is, in a vast hidden expanse of freshwater named Lake Vostok which lies beneath nearly 4 kilometres of ice, directly below the coldest spot on earth. The water has been isolated from air and sunlight for up to 25 million years. Biologists can hardly wait to probe its mysterious depths and discover what strange organisms lurk within. Geologists and glaciologists are hot on their heels. For two years now, researchers round the world have been plotting ways to uncover the lakes secrets, and, if they get their wish, in the next few years we will witness the decade of Lake Vostok. Scientists There was an interesting thing on the radio last week. It seems that a bunch of scientists are getting themselves hot under the collar over what drives them to be scientists; the expression 'because it's there' springs to mind. Sure we all know its the age-old quest for knowledge, the desire to understand everything from the atom to the black hole. But what these guys want to know is why we want to know all of this in the first place and why can't science explain why we want to know? Surely, it's more important to know whether what we scientists are doing is right, rather than get bogged down in debates over the point of it all. I would have thought that the crucial issue here is not why we pursue it, but to recognise that science is a tool, and we are the ones who should decide how, where, when and why to use it.

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