By G. Mikes

How to Plan a Town

Read the text. In the first five paragraphs several sentences contain mistakes. Spot the mistakes and correct them.

II. Discussing the text

Think of appropriate contexts to use the following expressions.

Make sure you pronounce these words correctly. If necessary, look up their pronunciation in a dictionary.

Study the words.

I. Vocabulary work

How to Plan a Town

Dispense with, effeminate, muddle, vestige, conceit, ingenious.

Decadent, yogis, conspiracy, hieroglyph, thoroughfare, camouflage, promenade, viaduct.

Weak and effeminate peoples, to keep up one’s fighting spirit, century-old practices and tricks, an ingenious compliment, further precautions, to claim without immodesty, to shatter smb’s morale.

Britain, far from being a “decadent democracy” is Spartan country. This is mainly due because of the British way of building towns, which dispenses with the reasonable comfort enjoyed by all others weak and effeminate peoples of the world.

Medieval warriors wore steel breast-plates and leggings not only for defence but also to keep up their fighting spirit; priests of the Medieval ages tortured their bodies with hair-shirts; Indian yogis take their daily nap laying on a carpet of nails to remain fit. The English plan their towns in such a way that these replace the discomfort of steel breast-plates, hair-shirts and nail-carpets.

On the continent doctors, lawyers, bookmakers – just to mention about a few examples – are sprinkled all over the city, so you can call on a good or at last expansive doctor in any district. In England the idea is that it is the address that makes the man. Doctors in London are crowded in Harley Street, solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, second-hand-bookshops in Charing Cross Road, newspaper offices in Fleet Street, tailors in Savile Row, car-merchants in Great Portland Street, theatres around Piccadilly Circus, cinemas in Leicester Square, etc. If you have a chance for replanning London you can greatly improve on this idea. All greengrocers should be placed in Horsey Lane (№ 6), all butchers in Mile End (E.1), and all gentlemen’s conveniences in Bloomsbury (W.C.).

Now I should like to give you a little practical advice of great help on how to build an English town.

You must understand that an English town is a vast conspiracy to mislead foreigners. You have to use century-old practices and tricks.

1. First of all, never build a street straight. The English love privacy and do not want to see one end of the street from the other end. Make sudden curves in the streets and build them S-shaped too; the letters L, T, V, W and O are also becoming increasingly popular. It would be a fine tribute to the Greeks to build a few Φ and Θ -shaped streets; it would be an ingenious compliment to the Russians to favour the shape of Я, and I am sure the Chinese would be more than flattered to see some hieroglyph-shaped thoroughfares.

2. Never build the houses of the same street in a straight line. The British have always been a freedom-loving race and “the freedom to build a muddle” is one of their most ancient civic rights.

3. Now there are further camouflage possibilities in the numbering of houses. Primitive continental races put even numbers on one side, odd numbers on the other, and you always know that small numbers start from the north or west. In England you have this system too; but you may start numbering your houses at one end, go up to a certain number on the same side, then continue on the other side, going back in the opposite direction.

You may leave out some numbers if you are superstitious; and you may continue the numbering in a side street; you also give the same number to two or three houses.

But this is far from the end. Many people refuse to have numbers altogether, and they choose names. It is very pleasant, for instance, to find a street with three hundred and fifty totally similar bungalows and look for “The Bungalow”. Or to arrive in a street where all the houses have a charming view of a hill and try to find “Hill View”. Or search for “Seven Oaks” and find a house with three apple trees.

4. Give a different name to the street whenever it bends; but if the curve is so sharp that it really makes two different streets, you may keep the same name. On the other hand, if, owing to neglect, a street has been built a straight line it must be called by many different names (High Holborn, New Oxford Street, Oxford Street, Bayswater Road, Notting Hill Gate, Holland Park, and so on).

5. As some cute foreigners would be able to learn their way about even under such circumstances, some further precautions are necessary. Call streets by various names: street, road, place, mews, crescent, avenue, rise, lane, way, grove, park, gardens, alley, arch, path, walk, broadway, promenade, gate, terrace, vale, view, hill, etc.

Now the further possibilities arise:

a. Gather all sorts of streets and squares of the same name in one neighbourhood: Belsize Park, Belsize Gardens, Belsize Green, Belsize circus, Belsize Yard, Belsize Viaduct, Belsize Arcade, Belsize Heath, etc.

b. Place a number of streets of exactly the same name in different districts. If you have about some twenty Princes Squares and Warwick Avenues in the town, the muddle – you may claim without immodesty – will be complete.

6. Street names should be painted clearly and distinctly on large boards. Then hide these boards carefully. Place them too high or too low, in shadow and darkness, upside down and inside out, or, even better, lock them up in a safe in your bank, otherwise they may give people some indication about the names of the streets.

7. In order to break down the foreigner’s last vestige of resistance and shatter his morale, one further trick is advisable: introduce the system of squares – real squares, I mean – which run into streets like this:

Princes Square Leinster Square

Princes Square

Princes Square

Leinster Square

Leinster Square

Princes Square Leinster Square

With this simple device it is possible to build a street of which the two sides have different names.

P.S. I have been told that my above-described theory is all wrong and is only due to my Central European conceit, because the English do not care for the opinion of the foreigners. In every other country, it has been explained, people just build streets and towns following their own common sense. England is the only country of the world where there is a Ministry of Town and Country Planning. This is the real reason for the muddle.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-24