A child s christmas in wales From “Quite Early Early One Morning” by Dylan Thomas)

It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve, and 1 was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would sidle and slide over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson. Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared. We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday that we never heard Mrs. Protlioro's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbour's polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder.

"Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she bent the dinner-gong.

And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dinning-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompei. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house, laden with snow-balls, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room. Something was burning allright perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of room, saying, ''A fine Christmas!" and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.

Iceberg - a source of fresh water

Icebergs towed from the Antarctic to the Red Sea could provide economic source of fresh water for Saudi Arabia. There are no technical problems to which we cannot find a solution.

In France a detailed plan for towing the icebergs, each weighing 100 Mt, across the Indian Ocean, and through the Gulf of Aden to the mouth I the Red Sea was developed. There they would be chopped into manageable pieces (about 1Mt each), using heated cables, and towed through the shallow Bab el Mandeb Straits to the Saudi coast.

Even in tropical temperatures, natural thawing of the icebergs would not be quick enough to match demand for fresh water and the problem is of working out ways of spading up formation of the fresh-water pools by induced melting. That is the last of the problems to be solved, and it should not be a difficult one.

The giant icebergs must be wrapped in an insulating jacket to cut down melting Losses on their 8,000km journey. At an estimate speed of 1 knot, it will take 6-8 months for five tugs to pull the iceberg along a computer plotted route, taking advantage of prevailing currents and winds and dodging high ways.

Cities

About one third of the world's people live in cities. Some cities have very large populations, including a few that have more than 10 million inhabitants. Most of the people work in the city but it can take them a long time to travel from home to work. Roads become so congested that traffic is very slow moving. To get round this problem some cities, including London, Paris, Prague, New York, Tokyo and Moscow, have underground trains (subways).

All cities are built up. This means that most of the available space has to be used to provide homes, business premises and civic buildings including city halls, schools and hospitals. Space is saved by building very tall blocks called skyscrapers which will tower above older buildings. Many cities have a mixture of ancient and modern buildings because they have grown and developed over a very long time.

If you were to take a map of a city and colour all the homes in one colour, all the shops another and so on for every different type of building, you would probably see a pattern. This pattern is called the structure of a city. For example, there are usually more houses and flats around the outside of a city than in the middle. The centre is often full of offices and shops, although there are also shops in among outer areas of housing. The main roads in and out of your city may show a pattern: leading to other cities, or avoiding high hills, for example. Factories may be together on one side, not in the centre.

Latka

Latka was a customs officer in Europe. He used to work in a small border town. It wasn't a busy town, and there wasn't much work. The road was usually very quiet, and there weren't many travelers. It wasn't a very interesting job, but Latka liked an easy life. About once a week, he used to meet an old man. His name was Spevna. He always used to arrive at the border early in the morning in a big truck. The truck was always empty. After a while Latka became suspicious. He often used to search the truck, but he never found anything. One day he asked Spevna about his job. Spevna laughed and said, "I'm a smuggler."

Last year Latka immigrated to the United States. One night he was having dinner in a restaurant in Los Angeles. On the other side of the restaurant he saw Spevna drinking champagne. Latka walked over to him.

Latka: Hello, there!

Spevna: Hi!

Latka: Do you remember me?

Spevna: Yes, of course I do.

You're a customs officer.

Latka: I used to be, but I'm not any more. I retired last year, and I live in Los Angeles now. I often used to search your truck.

Spevna: But you never found anything!

Latka: No, I didn't. Can I ask you something?

Spevna: Of course you can.

Latka: Were you a smuggler?

Spevna: Of course I was.

Latka: But the truck was always empty. What were you smuggling?

Spevna: Trucks!

Herbert loved London. He didn't like the busy crowded places — he loved the small back-streets. He loved exploring these streets, and every weekend he walked for miles through them. One Saturday morning he was walking along a very small street. He was looking into the shop windows, and admiring the old buildings. Suddenly he felt hungry. He decided to stop for lunch in the nearest restaurant. It seemed quite ordinary - but then he noticed a sign in the window. The sign said: "We can serve anything. You name it, we can serve it."

"That's impossible," Herbert thought to himself. But he decided to go in and find out. He sat at a table near the door. When the waiter came to take his order, Herbert asked for elephant ears on it. The waiter wrote it down calmly and went into the kitchen. A few minutes later he came back and said very apologetically to Herbert: "I'm sorry, sir — but we can't serve elephant ears on toast."

"Ah, ha!" said Herbert, "I knew it was impossible, you haven't got any elephant ears, have you?"

"We have got plenty of elephant ears, sir," replied the waiter in very dignified voice, "but I'm afraid that we've run out of bread."