«Titanic»

The 14th of April 2012 was the centenary – the 100th anniversary – of the sinking of the
passenger ship Titanic in the north Atlantic. This podcast is about Titanic. I hope it will help you
to learn some new words and expressions about ships and the sea, and that you will learn about
“unsinkable” words. (Don’t know what “unsinkable” words are? Then listen carefully to the rest
of the podcast!)
 
Titanic has appeared in one of these podcasts before. Just over a year ago, we visited Belfast in
Northern Ireland and the shipyard where Titanic was built. When she was launched, Titanic was
the biggest ship in the world, and one of the most comfortable and luxurious. One hundred years
ago last week, she set sail from Southampton on the south coast of England on her maiden
voyage to New York.
 
On board, there were over 1300 passengers. About 300 of these were First Class passengers, who
enjoyed facilities such as restaurants, cafes, a library, a gym, a swimming pool and a telegraph
office which could send radio messages back to families and business colleagues on shore. The
First Class passengers included some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world.
Most of the passengers, however, travelled Second or Third Class, in much more humble
conditions.
 
Then there were 885 crew members, including 300 men to look after Titanic‘s huge steam
engines and feed them with coal. There were also large numbers of cooks, waiters, cleaners and
other people to look after the passengers. There was a cat too, with her kittens.
 
Titanic called first at Cherbourg in France and then at Cobh in Ireland before setting out across
the Atlantic. Then, shortly before midnight on 14 April 1912, when she was 600km south of
Newfoundland in Canada, she struck an iceberg. Slowly the ship filled with water. The crew
launched the ship’s lifeboats, but there were not sufficient places in them for everyone. Over
1500 of the passengers and crew died in the freezing waters of the Atlantic; only 710 were saved.
 
The sinking of Titanic shocked and horrified people in both Britain and America. They were
shocked that there were not enough lifeboats. They were shocked that so many people had died,
and that the families of many of them were left in poverty. Nowhere was the shock greater than
in Southampton, where many of the crew had lived. It is said that every street in the city had at
least one family who had lost someone in the disaster. Above all, people in Europe and the
United States 100 years ago believed in technology and progress. They thought that modern
technology and engineering could do almost anything. They were shocked to learn that nature
could so easily destroy the biggest and most advanced ship in the world.
 
The story of Titanic still fascinates people today. The wreck of Titanic was rediscovered on the
bed of the Atlantic in 1985, and many items such as crockery and bits of luggage were brought to
the surface and exhibited for people to see. There have been countless books and films about
Titanic‘s first and last voyage, and theories about what really happened and who was to blame
for the sinking.
«Dull and Boring»
Do you know the English word “dull”? “Dull” is the opposite of “bright”. Often it means
“uninteresting”. We can talk about dull weather, which means cloudy weather, probably some
rain and certainly no sunshine. We can talk about a dull book or a dull lesson. And we can say
that someone is dull – a dull person is probably not very intelligent, and has nothing interesting
or lively or amusing to say. We have a saying in English that “All work and no play makes Jack
a dull boy”. Do you know someone who works all the time and never relaxes and never goes out
to enjoy themselves?
 
And I am sure that you all know the word “boring”. It means unexciting and uninteresting. It is a
favourite word of English teenagers. If their parents suggest something to them, like “Shall we
all go to the cinema tonight?”, the teenager will probably reply “boring”, because when you are
15 years old, any activity involving your parents is boring.
 
There is a village in Scotland called Dull. It is very small, with only a single row of houses.
There is a church, but it has not been used for several years. There is a school too, but it is
closed. In the past, Dull was quite interesting. It was an early Christian settlement, and there was
an abbey where the church now stands. But nothing interesting seems to have happened in Dull
for several hundred years, and today Dull seems to be a very dull place indeed.
 
Elizabeth Leighton lives in Dull. However, she is obviously not a dull person, because recently
she went for a cycling holiday in America. And while she was there she discovered a town called
Boring. Boring is in Oregon, in the north-west of the United States. The north west of the United
States is a bit like Scotland – lots of rain, and snow in the winter. Boring has about 12,000
inhabitants, which means that it is quite a bit bigger than Dull. But is it any more interesting? It
has a timber mill, and a place where they train guide dogs for blind people. But the railway line
closed years ago, and I guess that many of the inhabitants of Boring commute to work every day
to the city of Portland, which is not far away.
 
Elizabeth Leighton had the great idea that Dull and Boring should become ‘twin communities’.
There could be a sign outside Dull saying “Dull, twinned with Boring” and a sign outside Boring
saying “Boring, twinned with Dull”. And people passing by would smile and think that, even if
Boring is boring, and Dull is dull, people in the two communities at least have a sense of
humour. The local authorities in Dull and Boring are now considering Elizabeth’s idea.
 
Now I don’t want to spoil a good story for you, but I have to point out that Dull is not called Dull
because it is a dull place. The name Dull comes from the Scottish Gaelic language, and probably
means “meadow”. And Boring is named after an old soldier from the American Civil War who
was called William H Boring. After the war, he settled in Oregon, and lived there until he died in
1932. Because William Boring lived nearby, and was one of the leading citizens of the place, it
was natural for the railway company, and later the US Post Office, to call the settlement
“Boring” in his honour.
«School dinners»
Today we visit Scotland, to find out what a Scottish schoolgirl thinks of her school meals. And
because the European Cup Football matches have reached an interesting stage, and poor old
England have been knocked out by Italy, this might be a good time to learn a new football
expression.
 
Martha Payne is 9 years old. She lives in a small community in Scotland called Lochgilphead.
Like many British schoolchildren, Martha has a meal at school in the middle of the day. In
English, we often call these meals “school dinners”. Everyone remembers the school dinners at
their school – perhaps they loved their school dinners, or they hated them, or they remember
funny things about them. At my school, way back in the 1950s, we sometimes got bilberry tart
and custard for dessert. I remember that the bilberries made our tongues blue. We used to go
around sticking our blue tongues out at each other.
 
Martha is interested in the food at her school. She is interested in how good it tastes, and how
healthy it is, and whether it contains any hairs! A few months ago, she started to write a blog
about her school dinners. She took her camera into school, to photograph her school dinner, and
then she posted the picture in her blog and told us what she thought about the food. Most days,
she thought the food was OK, and on some days she thought it was really good.
 
Children in other schools, and in other countries, started to read Martha’s blog. Some of them
left comments to say what they thought about Martha’s school dinners. And some sent Martha
pictures of their own school dinners, and Martha published these on her blog. Then Martha
started to use her blog to raise money for a charity called Mary’s Meals, which provides school
meals for children in poor communities in developing countries.
 
And at this point, the bureaucrats who run the education system in the part of Scotland where
Martha lives became aware of her blog. And they did not like it. They did not want publicity
about the food in their schools. Perhaps they were afraid that people would start to criticise their
school dinners and say that they were unhealthy. They decided that Martha’s blog had to stop.
 
Martha’s headteacher told Martha the bad news, and Martha was sad and wrote a final blog post
to say goodbye to her many readers.
 
At this point, we will make a little diversion to talk about football. In football, you try to kick the
ball into the other team’s goal. It is a big mistake to kick the ball into your own goal. Of course,
sometimes, by accident, footballers do put the ball into their own goal. When this happens, we
call it an “own goal”. We can use this expression outside football as well. Imagine that you do
something, and it goes spectacularly wrong. It has completely the opposite effect of what you
intended. You hoped that it would make things better, but actually it makes things a lot worse.
We call that an “own goal”.

Well, the bureaucrats who decided that Martha had to stop her blog did not want people talking
about the school dinners in their schools. But you can imagine what actually happened. The
newspapers, the radio and the television all carried stories about Martha’s blog. People wrote
about it in Facebook, and sent tweets about it in Twitter. This was not at all what the bureaucrats
wanted. Banning Martha’s blog was an “own goal”. A day later, after everyone had told them
what idiots they were, they decided that – after all, and now they had thought about it a bit more
– Martha could continue writing her blog about her school dinners, and taking pictures of them.
You can find Martha’s blog at http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk. You could tell her about the
meals in your school if you like, and contribute to Mary’s Meals to help provide meals for school
children in poor communities throughout the world.
«The Scariest Day of the Year»
Today is 31 October, and it is the scariest day of the year. Do you know the verb “to scare”? If
you scare someone, you frighten them, you make them afraid. So, “scary” means “frightening”
and today is a special, scary sort of day, as I shall explain.
 
Today is Halloween. “Halloween” means “the evening of (that is, the day before) All Hallows
Day”, and “All Hallows Day” is an old Christian festival which takes place on 1 November,
when special prayers are said for people who have recently died. But Halloween is not a
Christian festival. Its origin lies in pre-Christian Ireland. It was a festival to mark the end of the
summer and the start of the cold days of winter. It was a time when the world of the spirits and
the fairies and the ghosts touched our world, and special magical things might happen. And
magical things are frightening. So Halloween is a special scary day!
 
Kevin and Joanne have invited all their friends to a Halloween party. They have put orange and
black decorations in their sitting room. They have bought some pumpkins and scraped the flesh
and the seeds out of them. They have cut scary faces on the pumpkins and put candles inside.
The pumpkins now look like the picture which you can see on the website, or on your iPod
screens. I am sure that you think that they are very frightening!
 
Of course, their friends will come to the party in fancy dress. That means that they will all dress
like evil witches, or like ghosts, or like spiders or other scary things. They will paint their faces,
or wear masks, to make themselves look even more scary. To add to the scary atmosphere, Kevin
has borrowed a DVD of an old film called Dracula. The film was made in 1931, and is about
Count Dracula, who is a scary man who drinks human blood at breakfast time instead of coffee.
Some of the guests at the party will come dressed as Count Dracula, with long teeth so that they
can bite the necks of other guests and drink their blood. Joanne has made a special drink, made
out of red wine and blackcurrant juice, so that the guests at the party can look as if they are
drinking human blood even if they aren’t!
 
Everyone will have great fun at the party. They will laugh at each other’s fancy dress. They will
turn the lights out and pretend to be ghosts. They will watch the Dracula film and pretend to be
scared. The men will do what they always do at parties – they will drink beer and talk about
football. And the women will do what they always do at parties – they will sit in the kitchen and
discuss each other’s husbands and boy-friends. (I find that bit really scary!) They will even find
time to play some games, like ducking for apples. This is a traditional game at this time of year.
You get a large tub of water and float some apples on the top. Each guest has to kneel in front of
the tub of water, with a blindfold so that they cannot see, and with their hands behind their backs,
and try to get one of the apples out of the water with their teeth. Everyone will get very wet, and
their special scary makeup will run.
 
Unfortunately, Kevin and Joanne have not invited me to their party. I shall have to stay at home
and try to be scared by myself. During the evening, the doorbell will ring. I will open the door
and see a group of rather small witches and ghosts standing outside. I will of course be very
scared, until I see that they are actually some of the children who live nearby. They are “trick-or-
treating” (or “guising” as people say in Scotland). They go from house to house asking for
“treats” such as sweets or biscuits. If you don’t give them any, they will do evil magic to hurt
you. And if you do give them some sweets or biscuits, the witches and ghosts will shout
“Thanks, mister” and run off to ring the doorbell next door.