Seduced by the olde worlde charms of... Leicestershire

Ruaridh Nicoll

After only a few miles we arrived in Stamford, a market town of stout Georgian houses, and pulled up outside The George, a coaching inn with roots in the Middle Ages. The River Welland made a slow and lazy progression past its walls.

Just beyond the door, a display case showed off a walking stick the thickness of a foxhound’s neck. It belonged, a note read, to Daniel Lambert, Leicester lad and great celebrity in the late 18th century. “Haven’t noticed you making a big deal of him,” I said to Pete, to which he shot back: “So easy, isn’t it, for the lazy, pie-chasing hack ... writes itself, doesn’t it?” Lambert was famous for being morbidly fat.

Yet the hotel wasn’t what I had been expecting. It carried its age in tranquil comfort. The wood-panelled hall gave way, by flagstone steps, to a garden restaurant, or to a dark bar where we drank a couple of pints of beautiful, fruity, hoppy Adnams. We ate in a dining room in which Maid Marian would have danced, and ordered – because Pete doesn’t get good meat in Sicily – roast beef. It arrived on a trolley, a vast, top-grade joint carved at the table and served with Yorkshire pudding.

Indisputably, there’s a certain romance to this. This was English food prepared perfectly, in the most English of surroundings, presumably as it had been for hundreds of years. But another friend, who was raised near Stamford, was appalled. “It’s the heart of Tory England,” she cried. “Can you imagine growing up there?” Well, OK ... but I did like it. And we hadn’t even found a pie yet.

Melton Mowbray turned out to be less picturesque. A drizzle was falling and the residents were sheltering under the eaves of a chippie, guzzling mouthfuls of fries. Pork pies were a spin-off from the town’s more famous blue cheese. Pigs were fed on the whey. Pete and I shared our first pork pie, a special one with a gooseberry pickle topping, bought from the bustling butcher Dickinson & Morris. It had exactly the right mixture of firm lardy pastry, bone jelly and peppery grey pork. It tasted superb. The memory of it makes me feel hungry.

In Sicily, we had wondered idly why pasta and pizza had become staples the world over, but the pork pie hadn’t caught on. Later in the trip, a pig farmer would point out that pies like these were eaten across Europe once, but it was in Britain that they survived. Actually in England, for north of the border we have our own delicacy, that mighty snack, the Scotch egg.

The Guardian, December 7, 2008

Task 5. Explain the meaning of the italicised word combinations in the article above.

Task 6.Write down all the adjectives in the paragraph beginning with Melton Mowbray turned out to be…. Determine their function in the piece.

Identify several stylistic devices in the article. What are they?

Task 7.Read the article below. What type of a feature article is it?

Gordon Brown: There is life after No 10

In his first major interview since losing the election, the former Prime Minister tells Christina Patterson why he’s thriving as a constituency MP – and happily living without the trappings of power

Christina Patterson

The last time I saw Gordon Brown, he made me cry. It wasn’t just the way he stood, a Heathcliff battered, but not broken, a wounded warrior setting his face, one last time, against the glare of the cameras, and the gaze of the cackling hordes for whom he had been sport.

It wasn’t just the tribute to his family, and his staff, and to the soldiers whose hands he had shaken. It wasn’t just his assertion that he had learnt “much about the very best in human nature and a fair amount too about its frailties”, including, he was careful to add, his own. And it wasn’t just those scrumptious little boys. It was the whole damned caboodle, the whole tragedy of it, and dignity of it, and pity of it, and screaming, howling, frustration of it, that what had started so well had gone so badly wrong.

But that was on the telly, and this is what TV producers like to call “reality” on a wind-swept July morning in Fife. In spite of widespread rumours that Gordon Brown has been abducted by aliens (or absent from London, which amounts to the same thing), or perhaps to counter them, I have been invited to spend a day in his constituency, shadowing him. I am excited. I am terrified. I don’t know how you talk to mad, bad mafiosi. I don’t know how you get them to open up, particularly when you’ve been told that they will only talk about their work in Fife. About which, it has to be said, you don’t know very much.

But here’s the car and here, leaping out of it, is the man. If he has spent the past two and a half months brooding in an attic, there isn’t much sign of it. Gordon Brown looks healthy and fit. When he bounds over and shakes my hand, he also seems quite cheerful.

We’re at Fife Energy Park in Methilfor a meeting with the MD of Burntisland Fabrications. It isn’t strictly speaking in Brown’s constituency, but Burntisland, where its other factory is. I passed through it on the train up, an almost parodically industrial vista of factory chimneys and red brick blocks, set against a background of driving rain and sea.

We march down a long corridor, running alongside a Tate Modern-sized space enclosing a giant pipe. At a meeting table dotted with cups of coffee and plates of biscuits (which nobody touches) Brown grills the MD on the company’s current activities, the number of “jackets” (sub-structures for the wind turbines) that it's producing and the number of apprentices it's taking on. I can’t keep my eyes off Brown’s face. It’s like a map of a man’s soul, a collage of storms and sorrow and steel. “For the benefit of Christina,” he says, jolting me out of my fantasies of fly-on-the-wall invisibility, “Britain is now the biggest producer of offshore wind”. I believe it. Leaving London in 28 degrees, I’d thought a summer frock would be just the ticket. Ever since I arrived, my fingers have been blue.

Perhaps sensing that the industrial history of Fife wouldn't be my special subject at Mastermind, Brown fills in some of the gaps. There used, he tells me, to be 66 mines, employing 33,000 people. But now mining has died. “Fife’s history,” he says, “has been trying to create new jobs in new areas every 30 years.” Apart from the dockyard and the naval base, and the lino industry which was once huge and has now dwindled to almost nothing, jobs in manufacturing are now few and far between. “What’s great about this project,” he says, and he looks as though he means it, “is that it’s about tackling climate change, creating new sources of energy, reducing our dependence on oil and creating new jobs.”

It’s time for us to get “booted up.” “I bet you didn’t think you’d be doing this,” says Brown chummily, as I swap my dainty black pumps for chunky builders’ boots and stuff my hair into a yellow plastic helmet.

Back in our normal shoes, and without our helmets, we set off in different cars to the next stop. It’s the Council for Voluntary Services in Buckhaven, a tatty building on a run-down parade.

The Independent, July 26, 2010

Task 8. What do the word combinations in the article (in the italics) mean? What lexical groups do they relate to?

Task 9.Answer the following questions.

1. What is the introduction of the article?

2. What does the sentence The last time I saw Gordon Brown, he made me cry imply?

3. Why do all the sentences that go after this phrase in the first and second passages begin with introductory It / And it ?

4. Why do four sentences in the third paragraph begin with the pronoun I ? Does the journalist stick to this style of writing further on? Why?

Task 10. Watch Video 5.1 of Unit 5 and get its general idea.

You might need to know the word combinations in the box to have a better idea of the talk.

to spend a day with sb up in the constituency domestic politics

fascinating to be up somewhere

to put on sth just for show to be in the mood

not to let slip anything (at all) not to be brooding

to enjoy life up there to be blunt with sb

to be peppered throughout the interview trappings of power

Task 11. Watch Video 5.1 again and highlight its idea with the pattern Who? – What? – When? – Where? (find more than one answer) – Why? – How?

What is the journalist’s attitude towards the article in question?

Task 12. Watch another fragment of the press review talk (Video 5.2), and try to find answers to the following questions.

1. How many papers are being reviewed?

2. How many issues are being raised? Some issues fall into several smaller problems. What are they? Fill in the grid below to report them.

Task 13.Watch Video 5.2 again and try to catch several colloquial words in Kelvin Mackenzie’s talk. What words does the journalist drop out while talking?

What is the meaning of the word band used by Kelvin Mackenzie?

Task 14. Watch Video 5.3 for information and answer the questions.

1. What event is highlighted in the report?

2. What papers are in the media focus?

3. How long for has it been part of British tabloids?

4. What is meant by a cover up in the report?

5. What is the view on the event:

- of the transport café customers;

- of those on the other side of the café’s counter;

- of the glamour industry representatives?

Unit 6

ANALYTICAL GENRES OF PRINT MEDIA: EDITORIAL, OP-ED, COLUMN, LTE

I. Editorial

An editorial is an opinion piece written by the senior editorial staff or publisher of a newspaper or magazine. Its purpose is to give the editor's opinion on the news published and to prove to the reader that it is the only correct one. As editorials are supposed to reflect the opinion of the periodical, they are usually unsigned.

In the UK, these unsigned columns are known as leading articles. In major USA newspapers, editorials are classified under the heading opinion.

The editorialappeals not only to the reader's mind but to the feelings as well. Alongside emotionally neutral words, lexical features of the editorial list colloquial words and expressions and special terms.

Editorials in different newspapers vary in degree of emotional colouring.

Editorials are characterised by:

- an objective explanation of the issue, especially complex issues;

- a timely news angle (current issues are examined);

- opinions from the opposing viewpoint that refute directly the same issues the writer addresses.

The s t r u c t u r e of the editorial is as follows:

- the introduction which states the problem for a target audience. It’s a thesis which is the foundation of the editorial. The thesis represents a clear stance the author takes on a particular subject;

- the body which expresses an opinion;

- the solution: offers a solution to the problem:

- the conclusion: emphasises the main issue.

There are the following t y p e s of editorials.

1. Editorials of argument and persuasion take a firm stand on a problem or condition. They attempt to persuade the reader to think the same way. This editorial often proposes a solution or advises taking some definite action.

2. Editorials of information and interpretation attempt to explain the meaning or significance of a situation or news event. There is a wide variety of editorials in this category, ranging from those which provide background information to those which identify issues.

3. Editorials of tribute, appreciation or commendation praise a person or an activity.

4. Editorials of entertainment have two categories. One is the short humourous treatment of a light topic. The second is a slightly satirical treatment of a serious subject. Satire is the use of sarcasm or keen wit to denounce abuses or follies. It ridicules or makes fun of a subject with the intent of improving it.

II. Op-ed

An op-ed, abbreviated from opposite the editorial page (though often mistaken for opinion-editorial), is a newspaper article that expresses the opinions of a named writer who is usually unaffiliated with the newspaper’s editorial board. These are different from editorials, which are usually unsigned and written by editorial board members.

Although standard editorial pages have been printed by newspapers for many centuries, the first modern op-ed page was created in 1921 by Herbert Bayard Swope of The New York Evening World. When he took over as editor in 1920, he realized that the page opposite the editorials was “a catchall for book reviews, society boilerplate, and obituaries.” He is quoted as writing:

“It occurred to me that nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial, which became the most important in America… and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.”

Both the op-ed and the editorial have similar structure and the intent, and may be classified the same way.

III. Сolumn

A column conveys other people’s opinions on the same subject or others (it gives the writer’s opinion on a topic of his or her interest) and may range from stories about private or public individuals to statements of the writer’s position on an issue of public concern. The writer, or columnist, writes these articles as a regular feature of his / her newspaper, and they appear in the same place in every issue of the newspaper, usually filling one entire column of text (hence the name). Column is published in an editorial section.

IV.Letters to the Editor

Letters to the editor (sometimes abbreviated LTTE or LTE), is a letter sent to a publication about issues of concern from its readers. Like op-eds, they present the writer’s opinion on a current topic, and may be based on personal expertise or on research.

Control Questions

1. What are the criteria for classifying an editorial, an op-ed and a column into separate genres?

2. Name all types of editorials.

3. What is the difference between an editorial in the US and in the UK?

4. What is the difference between: an editorial and an op-ed; an op-ed and a column?

5. What is the essence of a LTE?

Practical Tasks

Task 1. Read the following article. Analyse its structure, identify its constituent parts.

Greece’s economy is a lesson for Republicans in the US

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