If you are invited to an English home, at five o’clock in the morning you get a cup of tea. You must not say ‘Go away’. On the contrary, you have to say, with your best five o’clock smile, ‘Thank you so much. I love a cup of early morning tea, especially early in the morning.’
I was one of six children. I have two younger brothers and three elder sisters. My father was not a wealthy man and we lived in a three-bedroom house, so conditions at home were always quite cramped and there was little privacy. Yet I consider that I was extremely fortunate. The house was on the outskirts of a small town. Meadows, woods and even a friendly stream lay within walking distance of our home.
Sir:
I haven’t got a computer, but I was told about Facebook and Twitter and am trying to make friends outside Facebook and Twitter while applying the same principles.
There was a king who thought that he could paint very well. His pictures were bad, but the people to whom he showed them were afraid of the king. They all said that they liked his pictures very much.
There is probably no one among book-lovers who has not heard of Sherlock Holmes, the skilful and clever detective in the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes’ method of analysing the most difficult problems was to notice the smallest facts, even if they seemed unimportant. His method never failed; the criminal always had to give up, and to become the prisoner of the great detective.
A man entered a barber’s shop with a boy of five or six years old holding his hand. He was in a great hurry and he asked the barber to cut his hair first and later to cut the boy’s hair.
A nervous man, who lived in one of suburbs of a big town in England, was walking home from the railway station. The road was dark and lonely. Suddenly he heard footsteps approaching him from behind and thought he was being followed. He walked quickly. The footsteps continued to follow. The man started running. The footsteps still followed him. The man jumped over a wall and, running into an old cemetery, threw himself on the grass near one of the graves.
A rich American went to Paris and bought a very strange picture painted by a fashionable modern artist. The American thought the picture was very fine because he had paid a lot of money for it. But when he came to his hotel and wanted to hang the picture up on the wall, he could not tell which was the top and which the bottom of the picture. The American turned the picture this way and that, but still could not decide which was the top and which was the bottom.
One day a well-known singer was invited to the house of a rich lady to sing to her guests at a dinner-party. But instead of inviting the singer to dine with her guests, the lady ordered dinner for him in the servants’ room. The singer said nothing. He dined well and after dinner said to the servants, “Now, my good friends, I am going to sing to you”.
Some months ago, Mr. X went to England on a business trip. When he returned he told me the following story.
When I came to England I was very nervous, as I wasn’t sure that I would be able to make English people understand me. I put up at a hotel and understood the reception clerk when he asked me to fill in an arrival form. Then I asked the porter to take my luggage up to my room. So far, I made myself understood quite well.
