the lady writes: lack of adventures
DIFFICULTY: OOOH, THAT’S GONNA HURT
intro … This set of fill-outs is based on excerpts from letters written by Bethanie (aka the Lady) to her Czech friend Jana in the mid to late 1990s. Some of them (the early ones) were sent from Toronto, but most seem to have been written in Cambridge after Bethanie’s family moved back to England.
Interesting things were happening back then. A young politician by the name of Tony Blair became the British Prime Minister. In fact, all of Great Britain was undergoing some major changes, which you’ll read more about in Bethanie’s letters. In world news, SARS threatened to kill us all. Largely unnoticed here, Indians were raising some hell in Canada, though not nearly as much as the IRA was on its way out.
batch … dá
excerpt … výpisek, vý?atek, vybraný krátký úsek z delšího textu
SARS … akutní zán?t dýchacího ústrojí
raise hell … vyvád?t, spustit povyk
IRA … Irská republikánská armáda, ohavná teroristická organizace
reminisce … vzpomínat (na staré ?asy)
be on the lookout for st … vyhlížet, hledat
provide … poskytnout
off-and-on … ob?asný (chvíli je, chvíli není)
On a personal note, plenty of plans were made. Most never materialized but that’s always the trouble with plans. There’s some reminiscing about Bethanie’s stay in Czechia as well as her trip to Spain forty years ago. Bethanie’s family (her husband Paul, constantly on the lookout for a well-paid job, and son Patrick, constantly on the lookout for a way to avoid work) provides an endless source of news, as does Jana’s. So do her off-and-on office jobs. There’s an old friend, Veronica, who gets a mention. And of course, the weather remains one of the favorite topics.
lack of adventures
We _____ too many adventures lately. It has been mostly fairly quiet here, with a lot of house renovation. After two weeks without hot water and heating ( _____ of course the weather turned cold) Paul finally got all the plumbing _____ and we could all have a bath again and not have to climb over piles of rubble and copper piping to get to the bathroom. Patrick _____ to go without having a bath for a single day, but we older folk just remembered the Old Days, when the English _____ only one bath a week.
plumbing… potrubí, kanalizace
piles of rubble… hromady suti
copper piping… m?d?né potrubí
go without st… vydržet bez n??eho
plant… rostlina
Easter… velikonoce
burst out… vyrazit (kv?t)
grim… pochmurný
concrete… beton
pittance… almužna
We still haven’t finished the bathroom and have no washbasin but I feel we _____ that in the next few weeks. I am also very keen to move on to work on the kitchen and particularly to knock the walls down _____ a nice glass door at the back and sit indoors looking out at the garden. Which as usual is looking absolutely lovely at this time of year. Last autumn I planted a huge number of bulbs and they are all flowering now and looking wonderful.
It has been very warm recently, over Easter actually hot, hot enough for a T-shirt and sunhat, amazing. Everything is now bursting out into green and it really _____ sing. We are both so pleased we are not in grim freezing Toronto _____ the snow and the concrete. Just lovely.
The family are all alive and well, Paul working very hard and still waiting, as ever, for the Big Contract to come, but doing lots of other things ( _____ produce any money). I am still putting books on the shelves in Cambridge University Press, where I earn a pittance (nice word, that).
enjoy