How much does the Queen cost?

Thank you all for your e-mails, and for your suggestions about subjects for future podcasts.

A listener in France has asked, can I make a podcast about the Queen? And several other listeners have said that they would like some help with listening to numbers (which is always one of the most difficult things in any foreign language). I am going to kill two birds with one stone, as we say in English. This podcast is about the Queen, and also about listening to numbers. I have left gaps in the script where there are numbers,. Try to fill in the numbers as you hear them. You can check on the website whether you have heard them correctly.

Queen Elizabeth (a)..... came to the throne in (b)....., following the death of her father, King George©...... She is now (d)..... years old, and she has been Queen for (e)..... years. She is the (f)..... monarch (that is, king or queen) since the Norman Conquest of England in the year (g)...... What sort of things does she do?

The Queen has all sorts of official engagements in this country – visits to towns and cities, to schools and hospitals, to open new buildings and to attend official dinners. Last year she had (h)..... official engagements, which is (i)..... more than in (j)......

The Queen makes official visits to other countries too. Since she came to the throne, the Queen has made over (k)..... visits to about (l)..... different countries. Last year , she visited the United States, Uganda, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The Queen sends messages of congratulations to everyone in Britain who reaches their (m)..... birthday. Since (n)....., she has sent (o)..... of these messages. She has also sent more than (p)..... messages of congratulation to married couples who are celebrating their “diamond wedding”, that is the (q)..... anniversary of their wedding.

Last week, her office published the royal accounts for®...... The accounts show that the cost of the Queen’s official duties last year was £(s)...... This was £(t)....., or (u).....% more than in (v)...... However, officials at the palace want everyone to know that in real terms, that is after allowing for inflation, the cost of the Queen has fallen by (w).....% in the last (x)..... years.

How much is £(y).....? Well, there are about (z)..... people in Britain, so £(aa)..... is about (bb)..... pence for each of us. Palace officials, who try very hard to keep up with new technology and new fashions, have pointed out to the newspapers that (cc)..... pence is about the cost of a download from the iTunes music store.

An important part of the cost of the Queen’s official duties is the cost of travel. Travel, in Britain and overseas, cost £(dd)..... pounds last year. The Queen has a special royal train. Our newspapers love to tell us how much the royal train costs. Last year the royal train was used only (ee)..... times. One of these trips was a visit which Prince Charles made to a pub in the town of Penrith – the cost was £(ff)......

However, palace officials have told the press that there are serious problems because several of the royal palaces need to be repaired. Altogether an extra £(gg)..... is needed for this. The roof at Windsor Castle needs to be replaced – this will cost £(hh)...... Many parts of Buckingham Palace in London have not been redecorated for over (ii).....years, and the electrical wiring is over (jj)..... years old. It will cost £(kk)..... to rewire the palace, and replace the plumbing (that is, the water pipes and the drains), and to remove dangerous asbestos from the building.

In fact, Buckingham Palace seems to be such a mess that I am surprised that the Queen still lives there. If you know of somewhere else where she could live temporarily, until Buckingham Palace is repaired, perhaps you could telephone her office and tell them The number is (ll).....

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Here are the missing numbers from the podcast “How much does the Queen cost?” You can download a pdf version of the exercise and the answers by clicking the link at the foot of the page.

(a) the second (normally we write Queen Elizabeth II)
(b) 1952
(c) the sixth (King George VI)
(d) 82
(e) 56
(f) 40th
(g) 1066
(h) 440
(i) 60
(j) 2006
(k) 260
(l) 126
(m) 100th
(n) 1952
(o) 100,000 (note that in English we use a comma to separate thousands in big numbers)
(p) 280,000
(q) 60th
(r) 2007
(s) £40,000,000 (generally, in written English we would normally write £40 million)
(t) £2 million
(u) 6.1% (in English we use a full-stop, not a comma, when we write decimals)
(v) 2006
(w) 3.1%
(x) 7
(y) £40 million
(z) 61 million
(aa) £40 million
(bb) 66 pence
(cc) 66 pence
(dd) £6.2 million
(ee) 19
(ff) £18,916
(gg) £32 million
(hh) £16 million
(ii) 50
(jj) 60
(kk) £2.4 million
(ll) 020 7930 4832

Amazing, Stonehenge!

We English have not lived in England for long. Our ancestors, the Saxons, came to England from northern Germany in the fifth century. They spoke a language which we call Anglo-Saxon or Old English. Over the centuries, Anglo-Saxon changed to become modern English.

Before the Saxon invasions, people called the Celts lived here. The modern Welsh language is descended from the languages of these Celtic people. But the Celts had not lived in Britain for long, either. There were people here before the Celts came. These people had no written language, so they left us no manuscripts or inscriptions to tell us about them. However, they left us plenty of archaeological evidence – burial places, pottery, tools and so on. And they left us a remarkable and mysterious monument called Stonehenge.

If you drive by car south-west out of London, along a road with the romantic name A303, you will reach Stonehenge after about an hour and a half. You will see a circle of great stones, with other stones placed carefully on top of them. There are other, smaller stones – called “bluestones”. Around Stonehenge, there are other ancient places – burial places, for instance, and ancient paths.

The archaeologists tell us that Stonehenge was not all built at one time. The oldest parts of Stonehenge are about 5,000 years old. The “bluestones” came about 1000 years later, and the great circle of stones a few hundred years after that. The great stones probably came from a place about 40km away. They each weigh about 25 tonnes. Experts say that perhaps 500 men pulled each stone, while 100 more placed logs on the ground for the stone to roll over. The “bluestones” are even more remarkable – they are much smaller, about 4 tonnes each, but they come from Preseli in south Wales, a distance of nearly 400 km. How did they get to Stonehenge? Maybe people carried them on small boats, over the sea and along rivers.

The big question is “Why?” Why did these people, four or five thousand years ago, build Stonehenge, and what did they use it for? Here are some of the theories:

- Perhaps Stonehenge was a religious temple. Perhaps priests sacrificed animals or even human beings here.

- Maybe Stonehenge was a centre of political power, a place built by a great and powerful king.

- Possibly, it was a place to celebrate the dead, a place to send them on their way to the next world.

- Or it could have been a place where sick or injured people came to be cured, like Lourdes in France is today.

- Or Stonehenge might have been a place to watch the movement of the sun, moon and stars, and to forecast important events like eclipses.

- Or, conceivably, it was all of these things, or it had different purposes at different times.

Today, Stonehenge is an important tourist site, and a place for people who like to believe in magic. At the summer solstice (that is June 21st, the longest day of the year) people go to Stonehenge to watch the sun rise. This year, about 30,000 people were there. And, because this is England, it rained.

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The Loch Ness Monster - Part 2

In the last podcast, we talked about the Loch Ness monster, and we met Steve Feltham, who has spent the last 17 years living beside Loch Ness, looking for the monster.

On the website today, you will find a YouTube video. In the video, Steve Feltham tells us about what he does. I will not give you a transcript of what he says, but here are some of the main things, to help you understand.

He introduces himself and tells us where he lives, how long he has lived there and what he does. He mentions a place called Dores where he now lives permanently.

He tells us about “the best thing he has seen” (ie the best sighting of something that might be the Loch Ness monster). It was near Fort Augustus, is at the southern end of Loch Ness.

He has also been out on Loch Ness in boats with sonar equipment. The sonar shows “little blobs”(ie little shapes) and sometimes some “big blobs”. Steve tells us what these “blobs” might be.

He tells us about the different theories that people have about the monster.

He tells us what he does when the water is flat and calm;and what he does when it is choppy.

He gets to hear about sightings which other people have made, and people often show him their photos and videos.

There are fewer good sightings of the monster today than there used to be. Steve puts forward a theory on why this might be.

There is a quiz on the website, so you can test how well you understood Steve’s video.

Quiz: How well did you understand the podcast?

The Loch Ness Monster

Loch Ness is in Scotland, and it is long and narrow and very deep. Loch Ness is special. What is it?

Well, “loch” is a Scottish Gaellic word that means a lake or an inlet of the sea. There are thousands of place names in Scotland containing the word “loch”. So Loch Ness is a lake. It is in fact the largest freshwater lake in Britain. But that is not the reason why Loch Ness is special.

No, Loch Ness is special because it has its very own monster. People say that deep in the lake there lives a large creature. Occasionally – very occasionally – you can see the creature swimming on the surface of Loch Ness, or even moving on the land close to the shores of the lake. No-one is certain what sort of creature it is, so it has no proper scientific name. But everyone calls the Loch Ness monster “Nessie”.

The oldest stories about the monster date from the 6th century. St Columba, who first brought Christianity to Scotland, is said to have saved the life of a man who had been attacked by a huge creature near Loch Ness. The modern stories about the monster started in 1933, when there were three sightings of a large, strange creature, about 1 metre high and 8 metres long, with a long neck. There have been similar reports in most years since then, sometimes of a creature on land, though more normally of a creature in the water. There have been some photographs of Nessie as well, but most of them are of poor quality, and some may be fakes. Several studies of Loch Ness using sonar equipment have found traces of a large object or objects deep in the water.

So what is Nessie? Some people think that she (or he?) may be a type of dinosaur, which had managed to survive when all the other dinosaurs on earth died out. But most scientists think that this is extremely implausible. So is Nessie some other sort of animal, such as an eel or a seal? Or perhaps Nessie does not exist at all. Perhaps the people who say that they have seen a creature in Loch Ness actually saw other things – a small boat, perhaps, or a group of birds, or a pattern of waves and shadows on the water.

Steve Feltham is one of the people who believes that Nessie exists. In 1991, he gave up his home, his job and his girlfriend to become a full-time Nessie hunter. For the last seventeen years, he has lived beside Loch Ness looking for the monster. His home is an old van that used to be a mobile library. It is parked in the car park of a pub, close to the shore of the Loch. Steve makes little clay models of Nessie to sell to tourists. He has only once, in 17 years, seen something which might have been Nessie, but that is not important for him. He loves his life as a Nessie hunter. We shall have more about him in the next podcast.

The Worst Poet in the English language

We stay in Scotland for today’s podcast. We are going to meet a man called William Topaz McGonagall. Most people agree that he was the worst poet ever in the English language.

He was born in 1825. His father was a cotton weaver, who had to move from town to town in Scotland to find work. Young William spent only 18 months at school before he too had to go and work in the mills and factories. He became a jute weaver in Dundee, a town on the east coast of Scotland. (Jute is a fibre which is used to make sacks. In the 19th century, Dundee was the centre of the jute industry in Britain). It was in 1877, when William was 52 years old, that he suddenly discovered that he was a poet. Not just a poet – a great poet – possibly the finest poet since Shakespeare.

Over the next 25 years, Willam McGonagall wrote a large number of poems. He wrote about the great public events of the day, like the attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria, and the funeral of the Emperor of Germany. He was particularly fond of disasters, like shipwrecks and railway accidents. He wrote about famous battles, and about people and places that he knew.

And his poetry was bad. It was so bad that it almost became good, if you see what I mean. It was like someone playing a musical instrument, loudly and confidently, but completely out of tune and without any sense of rhythm. It was like a newspaper report turned into poetry. Here are some examples.

In 1878, a railway bridge was built over the river Tay near Dundee. At the time, it was the longest bridge in the world. It was a triumph of British engineering, and the nation felt proud. Naturally, William McGonagall wrote a poem about it. It began:

Beautiful railway bridge over the silvery Tay!
With your numerous arches and pillars in so grand array,
And your central girders, which seem to the eye
To be almost towering to the sky.

Less than two years later, the Tay bridge collapsed in a storm while a train was passing over it. Many people were killed. McGonagall wrote:

Beautiful railway bridge over the silvery Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remembered for a very long time.

A new Tay Bridge was completed in 1887, and of course William wrote a poem for the occasion. I think you can guess how it began.

Beautiful new railway bridge over the silvery Tay!
With your strong brick piers and buttresses in so grand array,
And your thirteen central girders, which seem to my eye,
Strong enough all windy storms to defy.

William McGonagall organised public events where he would read his poetry. They were very popular. People came to laugh at his poems, and throw rotten fruit and vegetables at him. (Obviously, in those days, there was not much to do in Dundee in the evenings). But McGonagall continued to believe that he had a special gift as a poet. His fame as a bad poet spread throughout Scotland, and then in the rest of Britain and in the British empire. But his poetry did not make him rich, and he died penniless in Edinburgh in 1902. He has never been forgotten however. His books of poetry have been reprinted regularly. Last week, a manuscript of some of his poems was sold at auction for thousands of pounds. People still read his poems today and smile.

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